How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?
I disagree, RMS.  For the same reason you&#x27;ve argued that open source is better than closed source, so is transparency better than privacy.<p>What democracy needs isn&#x27;t privacy.  Privacy has always been a false value.  Privacy is disappearing- period.  No amount of gum-flapping, law-making, or attempts to complicate our lives or burn more CPU cycles and create more latency with more layers of security will change that.<p>What democracy needs is respect and tolerance.  Specifically, we need: 1. Surveillance being broadcast instead of going to monolithic corporations and governments, 2. To learn to tolerate and respect each others&#x27; wishes as to what is done with that surveillance.<p>We&#x27;re living in a closed system, no different than the International Space Station.  No one on the ISS wants privacy.  They want sensors covering every God damn millimeter of the space station 24&#x2F;7, and they want mission control analyzing that data around the clock, so that if there&#x27;s an issue with atmospheric or hull integrity, they get plenty of warning.<p>What they want in lieu of privacy is respect from each other to be left alone when they want alone time and to not be judged for what they do with their down time.  That&#x27;s respect, which is very different from privacy.<p>Hawking is dead wrong about us needing to get off the planet in 1000 years.  What we need is to learn how to live in smaller closed systems, such as underground bunkers, undersea habitats, and sealed buildings, because no matter what planet colonists end up on, that&#x27;s what they&#x27;re going to have to do.  After we destroy our ecosystem here, it&#x27;s what we&#x27;re going to have to do to survive this planet keeping the pollutants and excessive weather and heat on the outside.<p>This is a much more profound psychological challenge than it is a technical one, but we can&#x27;t make that first step until we come to understand that privacy is not a virtue.  Privacy is asymmetric ignorance.  It is a cheap hack workaround for what really matters: tolerance and respect.