Re: Privacy controls == censorship (?)

David Long (dxlong@aol.net)
Thu, 22 Jan 1998 17:33:37 -0500


>sinister motive. There is little reason to fear the growth of
>private-sector databases.
>
>What we should fear is the growth of government databases.

I find this argument ingenuous.

As a recent news story [1] shows, the "firewall" between private-sector
and government databases can be anything but.

Key Logic, noting similar problems with software [2], developed a
capability-based OS. Despite its elegant architecture, I can't
imagine that its underlying abstractions would adapt well to
wetware systems.

Do the trust-mongers on FoRK have solutions to this sort of problem?
Are they optimal? (for *whom* are they optimal? :-)

To quote inFormation[3]: "computers make people easier to use all the time"

-Dave

[1] http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,17974,00.html
[2] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/ConfusedDeputy.html
[3] sorry, not Raytheon's... I believe this is a dead-trees only pub.