Horizon

"If the cost of installing the infrastructure becomes so huge that it erodes our personal prosperity."

I am not convinced by that at all. Surely surveillance is becoming a ridiculously cheap option. Orwell could only imagine cumbersome two-way telescreens; think of the snooping possibilities of the almost given-away cellphone camera.

In fact with all the talk in the article about camera phones that seems to be one of its major points. Probably goes to support the David Brin position that we can't hope for privacy any more but at least we can insist on transparency: glass houses being unpleasant but not so bad as a panopticon.

Reminds me of the Gibson article that showed up on Slashdot a while back. However, Gibson envisioned a two-way surveillance between private citizens and the government, rather than the multi-way serveillance the article describes.

Martha, can you tell us more about Brin's position, or perhaps post a link?

Here's the section on Brin's own webpage. Cited as an interesting position rather than fully endorsed.
http://www.davidbrin.com/privacyarticles.html