As usual, Bruce Schneier puts it more eloquently than I can: …it’s precisely why, when people in their business are in charge of government, it becomes a police state. If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it’s true… Continue reading Security vs. Privacy
Category: politics
Our Paranoid Society
This is what happens when everyone is afraid of everyone else: His mission was to photograph each of the nation’s 50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard from each city, using postage stamps from a childhood collection. Each postcard would be mailed to the next state on his journey, where he would pick it… Continue reading Our Paranoid Society
Democracy and Liberty
This little analogy, found in a signature on Slashdot, sums it up quite nicely: Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
The Right to Read
I stumbled across this the other day – it’s a sort of story about the future, or what it might be like, if we continue to allow both large corporations and the government dictate what we do with the information we buy. I came across it because I was reading about Amazon’s new e-book reader… Continue reading The Right to Read
Taking Pictures from a Train
This is absolutely terrible: The train is a half hour west of New Haven when the conductor, having finished her original rounds, reappears. She moves down the aisle, looks, stops between our seats, faces the person taking pictures. “Sir, in the interest of national security, we do not allow pictures to be taken of or… Continue reading Taking Pictures from a Train