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From: randolph@cognito.Eng.Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: The end of privacy... and so what comes next?
Summary: The glass city
Message-ID: <10777@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 1 Apr 91 08:40:30 GMT
References: <63473@bbn.BBN.COM>
Sender: news@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM
Lines: 33

Bernie, you touch on serious philosophical issues here.  We are here
discussing nothing less than the line between society and individual.
One philosopher to look at here is Michel Foucault -- look in the
*Foucault Reader* under "Panopticism".

Basically, I'd say that the less privacy, the more is subject to
social control -- peer, family, market, religious, government, and so
on.  In psychology there is the idea of personal "boundaries" and the
idea that too much invasion is psychologically destructive -- that
sufficient invasion, even for the best reasons, creates psychological
trauma.  Experience seems to bear this out -- some of the most
stressful situations of our lvies are the most public and extremely
public societies tend towards conformity.  Now, there are plenty of
people who would be only too happy to force conformity on us all.
But, even from a strictly utilitarian viewpoint, this is foolish;
privacy is necessary for social flexibility and creativity.  The only
comfortable very public society would be one socialized to an almost
unimaginable degree of tolerance -- perhaps a good thing.

Finally, there has been some work on cryptographic protection of
privacy; Brad Templeton hinted at some of it.  The article in this
area (you've given me the third reason to post the citation) David
Chaum's "Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make
Big Brother Obsolete".  It's in Communications of the ACM, October
1985 issue (vol 28, number 10).  Communications is of course published
by the Association for Computing Machinery and, if you can't find it,
I believe ACM does reprints.

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 ou    ui
R Press  T  __Randolph Fritz  sun!cognito.eng!randolph || randolph@eng.sun.com
 ou    ui     Mountain View, California, North America, Earth
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