Mark M. wrote:
I wonder how expensive it would be to put a GPS receiver in a cell phone and have the option to transmit the coordinates on a separate channel. There would be little difference between this and forcing cell phone companies to triangulate every call. The primary motivation for this is almost certainly "location escrow" to make it easier for the feds to track drug dealers.
Replace the words 'drug dealers' with the words 'everyone', and I think this becomes not only a correct statement, but a very revealing one. It doesn't matter whether the subject is crypto, cell phones, or any communications item or issue, the 'answer' to the proclaimed 'problem', according to the government, is to increase the government's ability to monitor every citizen, everywhere, at any time. Our prisons are overflowing with drug dealers and drug users who were put there by quite ordinary means which didn't involve violating or discarding the rights of the ordinary citizen. Yet we keep hearing cries from the government for the desperate need to infringe on the citizen's right to freedom and privacy, again and again, in order to jail the guys who were supposed to be jailed by the 'last' infringement on the average citizen (and the one before that). So far, as a result of the plethora of laws passed to enable law enforcement agencies to 'catch drug dealers', I have seen only a few minor criminals who are claimed to have been brought to justice as a result of these laws, while seeing documentation of hundreds and thousands of ordinary citizens being harassed and having their human rights violated by these same laws. And still, we have people like Mark, who seem relatively intelligent and informed but who still echo the party-line of Big Brother when He proclaims that the average citizen must be subjected to new and better ways to monitor the movements and activities of His citizens in order to 'protect' them from 'drug dealers'. I am certain that the issues (and the debates about them) will be the same as today, when the dawn finally comes where we hear the announcement about the plans for identity-chip body-implants. I am sure that the government will tell us that our privacy and rights will be protected by the Key Escrow encryption in the identity-chip which will only be compromised for the purpose of catching 'drug dealers' and other 'scum'. I am sure that the statement above will be pooh-paah'd by many as an example of reactionary-paranoid thinking, but the same could be said for all of the rights and privacy-infringing realities that we currently live under. (Like having to provide samples of bodily fluids to keep your job as a janitor--in case you've been dipping into the coke stash of the CEO, who does 'not' have to piss in a jar.) Five years from now, you may well be wearing an identity-anklet at work (to combat employee-theft, etc.) and still laughing at my ludicrous example of body-implant identity-chips. ("It's not like they make us wear them at home, they are just for protecting us from unfair firing by our employer.") Ten years from now, you may be wearing your identity-anklet at home, and still laughing about the idiot who predicted body-implant identity-chips. ("It's no trouble wearing it at home, especially if it helps catch those damn 'drug dealers'. They are the only ones who leave their house during the curfew hours, anyway.") A couple years after that, you will welcome the government announcement that they have found a solution to the 'problem' of having to wear the identity-anklet all of the time--the new, improved, identity-chip solution--the body-implant ID-chip. Naturally, you will pooh-paah the naysayers who claim that the body-implant chip will eventually have the capacity to read your mind. ("The guy saying that is the same idiot who predicted that we would all be wearing body-implant identity-chips... "Well, OK, that's a bad example, but...") You can fight the increasing hi-tech machinations of Big Brother to control our actions, movements, and our thoughts, but it will cost an increasing amount of time and effort to do so. Not to mention larger and larger amounts of money. But, maybe if you became a 'drug dealer'... Toto