Fw: Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to screw you

[dan at geer.org]

Brian, Would you accept the following restatement of your points?

When we -- the collective we -- are dependent on something, we are
at risk w.r.t. its denial.  When we are at risk w.r.t. its denial,
preventing that denial is a military concern.  When something is a
military concern, the vigor of concern is calibrated by some
characterization of those actors who might participate in attempts
to deny us that on which we depend.

The world is increasingly interdependent, hence increasingly at
risk w.r.t. denial of essential things.  That growing interdependence
is a network phenomenon, per se, hence instrumentation of all items
in the network is a military goal, per se.

For the individual whose mindset of tradeoff is "I want all the
goodies this modern world provides" then with that comes said
individual fully participating in the instrumentation complex.
For the individual whose mindset of tradeoff is "I wish to be left
alone" then with that comes said individual foregoing that increasing
fraction of the modern world's goodies that cannot be gotten without
instrumentation.

None of us here should be unwise enough to describe what we are
individually doing to decouple, but given the character of this
list I rather suspect that we are each and severally describable
much more as "Leave me alone" than as "He who dies with the most
goodies wins."

Back to you,

--dan