-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Changes that diminish the power of predominant institutions are both unsettling and dangerous. Just as monarchs, lords, popes, and potentates fought ruthlessly to preserve their accustomed privileges in the early stages of the modern period, so today's governments will employ violence, often of a covert and arbitrary kind, in the attempt to hold back the clock. Weakened by the challenge from technology, the state will treat increasingly autonomous individuals, its former citizens, with the same range of ruthlessness and diplomacy it has heretofore displayed in its dealing with other governments. The advent of this new stage in history was punctuated with a bang on August 20, 1998, when the United States fired about $200 million worth of Tomahawk BGM-109 sea-launched cruise missiles at targets allegedly associated with an exiled Saudi millionaire, Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden became the first person in history to have his satellite phone targeted for attack by cruise missiles. ! Simultaneously, the United States destroyed a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in Bin Laden's honor. The emergence of Bin Laden as the enemy-in-chief of the United States reflects a momentous change in the nature of warfare. A single individual, albeit one with hundreds of millions of dollars, can now be depicted as a plausible threat to the greatest military power of the Industrial era. In statements reminiscent of propaganda employed during the Cold War about the Soviet Union, the United States president and his national security aides portrayed Bin Laden, a private individual, as a transnational terrorist and leading enemy of the United States. The same military logic that has seen Osama bin Laden elevated to a position as the chief enemy of the United States will assert itself in governments' internal relations with their subjects. Increasingly harsh techniques of exaction will be a logical corollary of the emergence of a new type of bargaining between governments and individuals. Technology will make individuals more nearly sovereign than ever before. And they will be treated that way. Sometimes violently, as enemies, sometimes as equal parties in negotiation, sometimes as allies. But however ruthlessly governments behave, particularly in the transition period, wedding the IRS with the CIA will avail them little. They will be increasingly required by the press of necessity to bargain with autonomous individuals whose resources will no loner be so easily controlled. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: Hush 2.0 wmAEARECACAFAjum7LkZHGtleXNlci1zb3plQGh1c2htYWlsLmNvbQAKCRAg4ui5IoBV n4zwAJ9+40j74jjbcbrzY0/fF3xHjUoW/gCghKtU/SoccCUIUI6wxAH5k6ybdxU= =YKwk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----