At 12:35 AM 1/21/97 -0500, Jane Jefferson wrote:
Governments, however, are made up of the very same people who claim to require these rights to privacy. Those people create, codify and enforce the laws. The problem is that the people who find themselves in this position of power are not always the most moral or concerned with the best interest of the majority.
And fiendishly, it is the very chaos and anarchy and random chance espoused by proponents of the cypherpunk philosophy that allows these people to gain this power, unchecked!
Thus, the real problem ends up being not "how to control the government so that the government doesn't control us", but "how to deal with the government when it goes into control-freak mode". That it will go into such a mode is a given -- based on human nature and history. This is a fundamental cycle of evolution and human behavior. We have to face the fact that humans are predators, and as long as we are, the cycle of this behavior will continue.
Also, remember, that those people willing to put up with the responsibility of leadership are more often more extreme control freaks than the rest of the population. Persons asked on the street if they wanted to be president of the United States have often said no way, yet every four years we have at least two people willing to put up with the hassle in order to be the most powerful man in the country. What we need is a leader who is willing to put up with it for h[is/er] people/cause, but has no desire to stay any longer than absolutely necessary. Then we need another just like h[im/er] for the next term.