David Brin's Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society

Ten centuries before, at the preceding millennium, a Viking lord instructed the increasing surge to retreat. No deluded fool, King Canute directed in this way to educate flatterers a message -- that even sovereign rulers will not stop inexorable change.

A 1000 years subsequent, we face surges of technology-driven transformation that appear compelled only to accelerate. Waves of discovery may liberate human civilization, or disturb it, more than any thing since glass lenses and movable type. Critical conclusions throughout the next couple of years -- about study, buying into, regulation and way of life -- may work out what kind of civilization our young children inherit. Especially awkward are numerous information-related technologies that loom on the beside horizon -- technologies that may foster tyranny, or additional empower citizenship in a factual international village.

Typically we are notified, often and passionately, that Big Brother may misuse these new powers. Or additional our privacy and privileges will be contravened by some other group. Perhaps a financial, aristocratic, bureaucratic, thoughtful, foreign, lawless individual or technological elite. (Pick your very well liked bogeyman.)

Because one or more of these hubs of power might use the new devices to glimpse better, we're notified that we should all be very afraid. Indeed, our only wish may be to squelch or furiously command the attack of change. For the sake of security and liberty, we are suggested one prescription: We should restrict the power of other ones to see.

Half a 100 years before, in the middle of an era of despair, George Orwell conceived one of the most oppressive metaphors in publications with the telescreen scheme utilised to surveil and command the persons in his innovative "1984." We have been increased to a high stage of sensitivity by Orwell's self-preventing ...