Your ISP as Net watchdog

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Freedom vs. Security

Hi, OButterball.

You said:

"Freedom is MUCH more important than safety, because without freedom we are nothing more than zoo animals safely ensconced in our cages."

You could easily turn that argument around: Without safety, we'd all be dead anyway, and what kind of freedom is that?

The reason I was being very literal about Franklin's quote was that it rejects absolutism. It recognizes that *some* limitations on freedom are necessary for human beings to live in societies without rampant raping, murdering and pillaging. Recognizing this, it's foolish *not* to trade some freedom for safety. The question becomes, *how much* freedom do we trade in order to live safely?

As an example: We submit ourselves to searches of our persons and bags when we get on a plane. This is an invasion of our personal space and privacy. (A right to privacy isn't actually *in* the Constitution, but it's widely recognized as a Good Thing, and therefore has legal precedent in the U.S. The Constitution of the E.U., by contrast, has expicitly written in a right to privacy, if it ever gets ratified.) We submit to searches when we get on planes because we recognize, as a society, that it's better to have our privacy impinged upon when we get on a plane than to risk letting some nutjob on the plane with explosives or Bowie knives or other weapons. It's a trade-off.

Similarly, when you sign up for an ISP account, you do so with the understanding that you're accessing a computer network, and that that network is maintained and monitored.

I'm ambivalent about the need for such monitoring to catch child pornography. I think a lot of it could be nipped in the bud with more rigorous review of Internet chat rooms and newsgroups. But there never is, never was, and never will be anonymity on the Internet, unless and until the basic architecture is changed to no longer require a unique identifier to track packets.

Posted by: bhartman36   Posted on: 06/16/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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