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August 25, 2006

Flies to Honey

Flies to Honey: Trying to escape a future in the American penal system, an executive accused of stock fraud flees, but is located after he uses internet telephony. Much of the Techmeme commentary on the account in The Register focuses on Skype and governments, but the issue is more general -- any central datasource becomes an attractive target, whether to market pressure, legislation, corruption, criminals or evangelists. And yet the benefits and conveniences of VoIP or webmail or search are real. There's benefit to webcams in public places, wireless toll collectors, tiny sensors embedded in every object. But where is the data stored, and who can actually access it? Any sufficiently useful datasource will attract people who wish to use it inappropriately. "Can a government tap your Skype calls?" may be the wrong issue -- I think it may be more like "How can we build online services which are intrinsically protected from abuse?" And that seems a tough problem to solve....

Posted by JohnDowdell at August 25, 2006 08:02 PM

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Comments

I think this issue is not discussed enough. We are moving towards a network application and data storage architecture in the world with out asking how and where are data is being used. I have heard of people being pulled aside and questioned when entering the USA because the immigrations system had them tagged as viewers of Islamic sites. I don't mean possible viewers, but rather thaere were records that they had viewed such sites. [jd sez: That rumor is hard for me go believe, when you consider the hubhub about any official identification while on the net, the omnipresence of prejudice claims, and such. Citations could help make the case.]

Now I understand the need for saftey, but if we give up too much of our freedom for it we will loose both our saftey and our freedom. I wish there was a way to make applications non-vulnerable to government, or other eyes, but I fear that is not yet realistic. The inherint weakness is, as it has always been, the human factor. A server is never run by just one person.. And where there are 2, there can be 2 views, and mistrust can develop,... etc..

I don't mean to be an alarmist, but I think that there are not enough people who consider the implication of these things.

Posted by: Julian Sander at August 26, 2006 03:16 AM

Great articel with good information thank you.

Posted by: Johannes at August 30, 2006 09:33 AM