[ExI] The NSA's new data center

The Avantguardian avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com
Sun Mar 25 05:39:41 UTC 2012


----- Original Message -----
> From: Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se>
> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2012 5:36 AM
> Subject: Re: [ExI] The NSA's new data center
> 
> I did a little calculation: at what point can governments spy 24/7 on their 
> citizens and store all the data?

[...]
 
> We might actually be living in a short window of opportunity right now. The 
> problem is not the surveillance per se, but the danger from non-accountable uses 
> of them once they are in place. Totalitarian governments with this kind of 
> transparency might prove extremely hard to dislodge, and could become stable 
> attractor states. This suggests that we should work very hard on figuring out 
> how to maintain government accountability even when it has total surveillance 
> powers, and how to prevent open societies from sliding into the totalitarian 
> trap. Given that the tail statistics of big disasters is dominated by pandemics, 
> wars and democides we have very good reasons to view this as among the top 
> questions for human survival.

Excellent analysis, Anders. You are absolutely right. This generation, the generation that remembers and misses its privacy is the axis upon which this whole issue will swing. For the succeeding generations whose privacy seems so unlikely at this nexus, having never experienced privacy, they will not be able to assign it any moral or aesthetic value. They might even consider being "alone", "different", or "independent" wrong and tantamount to death. Like a worker ant separated from its sisters.
 
I have already warned you how protean "human values" are so If this is not what you want for your children, then the responsibility to avert that outcome rests squarely on THIS generation's shoulders. Because if you lose your privacy to the government, the next generation won't have clue what you are babbling about.

 
Stuart LaForge

"The state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting by fools." -Thucydides.





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