A Brave New World of Wiretapping
In Scientific American setzen sich Whitfield Diffie und Susan Landau mit der Geschichte der Telefonüberwachung und der Bedeutung der aktuellen Überwachungs-Debatten für die Zukunft einer freien Gesellschaft auseinander.
The distance our world has moved into cyberspace in the past century is minuscule compared with the distance it will move in the next. We are in the process of building the world in which future humans will live, as surely as the first city dwellers did 5,000 years ago. Communication is fundamental to our species; private communication is fundamental to both our national security and our democracy. Our challenge is to maintain this privacy in the midst of new communications technologies and serious national security threats. But it is critical to make choices that preserve privacy, communications security and the ability to innovate. Otherwise, all hope of having a free society will vanish.