TAG | We have the technology...but so do the bad guys |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Sunday, 22 June 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 It reported how law enforcement agencies in 20 countries had "smashed the oldest and most sophisticated Internet paedophile ring ever known," and how over the two year investigation they had watched the same small girl "grow up on film" as she was regularly abused and the images and videos posted on paedophile sites for the gratification of members.The report went on to say that the obstacles to identifying her location and releasing her "cannot be overstated...the reason the paedophiles had not been caught or even detected as a network was their level of security. To get into the inner sanctum a member had to go through stages of passwords, highly sophisticated encryption and security and code names...Police had never seen anything like it before...Members of the network even boasted among themselves of being able to defeat any law enforcement agency in the world." Conroy's vision of regulation by 'code' if it can be achieved could make it impossible for such activities to escape detection, but I'm not holding my breath: every advance in technology seems to be exploitable by the good and the bad alike. However while Conroy may be enthusiastic about the supposed benefits of regulation by code, the vision Lessig conjures up is less benign: it is one not merely of effective regulation by code: it is one of effective oppression by code. In his preface, he cites two science fiction writers - Vernor Vinge and Tom Maddox - addressing the 1996 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy" conference: "As this network of control became woven into every part of social life, it would be just a matter of time, Vinge threatened, before government claimed its fair share of control. Each new generation of code would increase this power of government. The future would be a world of perfect regulation, and the architecture of distributed computing—the Internet and its attachments—would make that possible...[Maddox's] vision was very similar, though the source of control, different. "The government's power would not come just from chips. The real source of power, Maddox argued, was an alliance between government and commerce. Commerce, like government, fares better in a better regulated world. Property is more secure, data are more easily captured, and disruption is less of a risk. The future would be a pact between these two forces of social order."
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