Viridian Note 00283: Geeks and Spooks

[mattd]

."... I am suggesting secure, accountable devices with digital signatures 
built in. They're cryptographically time-stamped, their voice signals and 
photographs are cryptographically overwritten, proving their source. They 
are tamperproofed, and very sternly verifiable, and usable as proven 
evidence in courts of law. They're not civilian toys, they are genuine 
weapons of information warfare, in much the same way that an unarmed 
Predator surveillance aircraft is a weapon. They are people's media 
weapons. Their proper use requires some training and discretion; it's like 
a citizen's audiovisual arrest. This is the civilian militia Minuteman 
version of surveillance. The omnipresense of this kind of civilian- owned 
and civilian-deployed surveillance would not make anyone's society kinder 
and happier. But it certainly would make that society a very dangerous 
place for urban guerrillas. And it would not centralize the great power of 
surveillance in the unstable hands of unelected functionaries...."

Why stop there? With a personally crypto encoded metalstorm E-Gun you could 
be a 'judge dread',citizen unit of the Anarchist Federation.