Monday, August 27, 2012

Free Societies Need Bad Security.

Effective security would have made Wikileaks, the Pentagon Papers, exposing Watergate, Iran-Contra, Abu-Gharib, and Teapot Dome impossible.

Imagine: A library replaced by a device which bricks if someone stops paying the monthly extortion fee. Owning of content is replaced with access to specific content on specific devices by specific people within a specific time. Archeological digs are futile. Correspondences of important people, those that are critical to the understanding of great thinkers, are totally opaque or destroyed forever.

General purpose computing no longer happens since all devices are locked down and not reprogrammable. Hobbyist computing and electronics is a historical footnote, only available on exorbitantly expensive authorized programmer machines where continual royalties are paid for nearly every action, automatically.

Your internet access device is something provably incapable of any kind of cryptography that will elude authorities with private keys burned in by the manufacturer gifting copies to those of power.

Machinery will oversee strict adherence to any power that wants to dictate how you live your life. Forget about things like drug experimentation, political dissent, unauthorized research or even speeding on the interstate at 3AM. Pop art like dj-remixing or what Andy Warhol did are either prohibitively expensive or legally (and therefore physically) impossible.

Commercial enterprises, as effective as predictable and irrelevant as integral, install proverbial blinders so consumers stare at the carrot on a string in front of them the entire day. They live in a powerless and ineffective fantasy world that convinces them of the opposite; creating the same art and have same ideas as every generation before without any access to those ideas.

After all, Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech" or the works of Camus, Orwell, and Huxley, are private property with perpetually extending sunsets of protection. In an effective security system, these pieces of private property can be removed and regulated to exist only under certain terms. It will be wonderful.

A world of effective security will only solidify and perpetuate the currently malleable power structures of society just like the development of giant weapons of the 20th century have brought on new eras of statehood longevity and oppression, irrelevance and absolutism, indifference and imminent destruction.

Ineffective security, which we currently have; permits the annals of power to be porous and vulnerable; where the light-footed innovator can expose corruption or redefine the world in new disruptive ways. It permits the curious to gain easy access to private property (such as a copy of Catch-22) regardless of the intentions of the property holder.  It permits for the free exchange of information because the gatekeepers locks currently do not work.

Being able to have introspective analysis into the machines of implementations permit new ideas to blossom, progressing society regardless of the confines of the socioeconomic order. Effective security will shackle this process by those confines, not liberate one from it.

That's the problem. It is important for things to be broken. It is absolutely critical to the organic nature of the process of innovation.

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