Forward Lateral

I’ve commented some at Bruce Schneier’s blog. Bruce does a great job of writing about cryptography. He also covers privacy issues and, unfortunately, isn’t nearly as thorough. To be sure, it is a thorny problem and it seems to bring the ideological kooks out of the woodwork. This makes “rational debate” quite difficult.

My concern is that changing technologies are presenting new privacy issues that are being ignored. For example, while video cameras have been around for a while, digital technology continuously reduces the cost — virtually to zero. Storage and network capacity grows exponentially, and we now have the ability to link all video cameras into a large network. We also have the technology, using facial recognition, triangulation, and other new approaches, to recognize individuals on camera and link them into a centralized database.

Without any constraints, we could be headed towards a dystopic future depicted in Orwell’s 1984 or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In these worlds, video surveillance is covert and pervasive, and those in power have the ability to use this information to their advantage. Is this an unrealistic scenario? I think not.