David is replying to John Gilmore's email here: http://www.politechbot.com/2005/03/08/more-on-teachers/ David's own web site, with information on his science fiction novels and "The Transparent Society" is here: http://www.davidbrin.com/ -Declan -------- Original Message -------- Subject: transparency, sousveillance and reciprocal accountability Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 17:59:01 -0800 From: d.brin <dbrin@private> To: gnu@private, declan@private, politech@private, pivotalinfo@private Thanks for sharing John's cogent reaction to the Brick Township hypocrisy. We are living in times when secrecy has become the great temptation of those in authority. They want light to shine on everybody but themselves. This is, of course, human nature. We should not get angry... that drug is for fanatics and ideologues of both left and right. We who are loyal to modernism and the Enlightenment should ignore emotion and think pragmatically. How can we make sure that the Enlightenment's one great innovation - reciprocal accountability - empowers all people to protect themselves against abuse of power? John points out that I speak up for openness in The Transparent Society. This seems especially important now, under an administrations that has reversed the trend of the nineties toward LESS government secrecy, and pushed instead for the greatest INCREASE of secrecy in our lifetimes, plus dozens of other measures to evade accountability. These measures should frighten us far more than a few tweaks of search warrant procedure that allow the FBI to see better. We are less threatened by the FBI seeing, than we are by them evading being seen. (Citizen supervision.) In fact, the radical version of reciprocal transparency goes beyond what I had in mind. See Steve Mann's sousveillance movement. Kind of creeps me out. But even such a world would be better than one in which we are all blind. http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm With cordial regards, David Brin www.davidbrin.com _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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