[ExI] What surveillance solution is best - Orwellian, David Brin's, or ...?

[A B]

"Why?"

Cost. Cost:Benefit is too high. If you have enough big
guns and big bodyguards, then it doesn't really matter
if most of your impoverished population doesn't like
you.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Herrlich

--- Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 26/06/07, TheMan <mabranu at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > There is a considerable risk that governments,
> even in
> > the most democratic countries in the world, will
> abuse
> > that kind of omnipresent, automated surveillance
> > system when they have it installed, and become
> > dictators, using their surveillance system to
> detect
> > any opposition in time to snuff it, and to
> frighten
> > people so that very little opposition even occurs.
> > Power corrupts; total power corrupts totally.
> 
> Surveillance technology has been available for
> decades that would
> allow governments to spy on anyone at any time. They
> could just pass a
> law mandating that every home is to be bugged, and
> that anyone caught
> interfering with the bugs goes straight to prison.
> Even if it were not
> a technically flawless solution, it would have to be
> be better than no
> bugs at all. Yet even extremely repressive regimes
> which have probably
> fantasised about such a system have refrained from
> implementing it.
> Why?
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Stathis Papaioannou
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
> 



       
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