I heartily endorse Jeffrey Harrow's "Harrow Technology Report." It's an excellent source of thought-provoking items about the advances technology is making on many fronts - and on the societal changes these advances bring in their wake.
In light of yesterday's bit about Privacy International's Stupid Security Competition, I thought this item from Harrow's reports was rather timely. Calpundit asked if we should laugh or cry, a valid question in light of his excellent January 21, 2003 post. Well...
"Today a company or agency with a $10 million hardware budget can buy processing power equivalent to 2,000 workstations, two petabytes of hard drive space (two million gigabytes, or 50,000 standard 40-gigabyte hard drives like those found on today's PCs), and a two-gigabit Internet connection (more than 2,000 times the capacity of a typical home broadband connection).Bottom line, says Harrow? "We will get the type of society that we allow ourselves to create. We have been warned..."If current trends continue, simple arithmetic predicts that in 20 years the same purchasing power will buy the processing capability of 10 million of today's workstations, 200 exabytes (200 million gigabytes) of storage capacity, and 200 exabits (200 million megabits) of bandwidth.
Another way of saying this is that by 2023 large organizations will be able to devote the equivalent of a contemporary PC to monitoring every single one of the 330 million people who will then be living in the United States."
"Surveillance Nation"
MIT Technology Review: April, 2003
(May require a registration on the site.)
Not entirely. To be fully warned, consider this: international organized crime will also have access to this level of computing power. What if the government wasn't the worst of your worries?
We need organized crime for two reasons.
1. To deliver products and services that require organization to deliver. The international trade in drugs is an example. This one is easy to defeat. Lower tariffs and end prohibitions of widely desired commodities or services. That is the best way to stop smuggling.
2. To handle crimes where division of labor makes the criminal system more efficient. Thieves and fences come to mind. Here technologies like e-bay eliminate the need for fences. The way to handle this is to get the police off the prohibition gravy train and put them to work on the harder effort to catch thieves.