The dark recesses of the Internet and police states

It seems that not a day passes without some increasing form of paranoia coming from the Canada/U.S. Border. Awhile back I saw a news post about a group of U.S. Border guards who beat Canadian Science Fiction author Dr. Peter Watts as he was leaving the U.S. for Canada. There are lots of angles on the story, but the result is that Dr. Watts is up on charges in the U.S. for acting in an aggressive manner (getting out of his car) towards the guards. Not mentioned is the fact that the U.S. border guard are not even suppose to be checking Canadians as they come back to Canada, that's the Canadian border guard's job. But I digress, my point is simply that we're living with increasing violence and paranoia. If September 11, 2001 did one thing, it was to leave the United States in a state of panic.

Canada is not much better. Our band over backwards for the United States Prime Minister has demonstrated that he's not interested in protecting ordinary citizens right to privacy, cow-towing to U.S. security interests instead. Is the United States any more secure? Not likely. There's an old adage in the computer industry that goes something like "if someone wants to get into your system bad enough they'll find a way." You can have the more secure system in the world, but it won't protect you from everything.

There is such a thing as preventative measures and such a thing as paranoia. We've gotten to the state where we're more paranoid than accepting. We're more interested in worrying about our own security than getting to know our neighbours. And with the increase of surveillance by Government and private organizations our privacy is non-existent, even in our own homes. If it's not cookies, recording your I.P. address, it's Picasa facial recognition, Facebook, Twitter, or social networking sites collecting and merging your information. And big media wants you to pay every time you even THINK about a song, they want to own the media even if they didn't create it, or create the container for the media (they're the brokers and they think they should have all the ownership rights). It's to the point that you can't create anything without violating someone's patent, or ownership.

So how do we get around all this? Reflection. I come from a generation of computer geeks who dialed up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS's) on our Commodore 64's, IBM PC clone XT's, and Apple II's. Bulletin Boards were like mini-Internet Service Providers (ISPs) where the BBS Sysop (System Operator) had the control over the content. While ISPs work much the same way in that they have control over content (they can restrict access), but because most BBS's were disconnected from other BBS's except through message and file networks, there was a bit more privacy in the BBS age.

BBS's were like a private Internet. Messages and files could be passed from BBS to BBS through networks like FidoNet. Because most bulletin boards were local, BBS Sysops often had parties, adding to the social/community aspect of the board.

Now I doubt BBS's are going to make a comeback, but I think there are lessons that can be learned from the BBS era. It was an era where people networked, but had some semblance of privacy.