Reorganized Freethought Section
May 25, 2004 top

The freethought section was originally intended to be bigger than it turned out to be because at the time this page was younger, I was still actively arguing a lot of theology on discussion boards. I had just broken free of the credulous dogma of my youth and so perhaps I placed too much importance on arguments about issues of faith and belief (perhaps it became a bigger issue simply because I exposed myself to so much arguing on those forums). Anyway, I still want to keep a section for freethought information and thoughts (perhaps branching out to some spiritual musings), but I don't think such a small section requires its own page anymore. So I've removed the freethought page and put it as a subsection within the philosophy page. I've also categorized the politics page and expanded it to be "politics and society".

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IT World has a report on the European Union's plan to invest in a secure communication system based on quantum cryptography - theoretically unbreakable code - in order to counter eavesdropping from things like Echelon. Unfortunately, it looks like the technical requirements will keep this technology off limits to anyone but governments and maybe big businesses for a while; it won't be ubiquitously available and easy like current encryption schemes.

Still, I suspect that as soon as this technology becomes widely used by businesses and lower levels of government, its availability will creep outwards (and be pulled there forcefully by hackers, e.g.) until the benefits of true full encryption are available to all. Perhaps technology like this holds the promise to counteract the moves by governments (American and others worldwide) to ever more invasively erode individual privacy and keep a watchful, omnipresent eye (thanks to computers - Orwell couldn't dream of such efficiency in his 1984) on every citizen.

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Truthout has a copy of a Washington Post article on interrogation in overseas prisons. Worth reading.

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Reuters Daily Environmental News covers a report on GM crops by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization. The report says that genetically modified crops are not being used to help feed the poor like they could be. Instead of working with important staple foods, researchers and farmers focus on profitable cash crops. So even if one ignores the potential environmental dangers of GM crops, their positive potential is still largely untapped because the system is set up by people who are profiting from doing things this way. The rich get richer and the poor still starve.

Hopefully, though, in time the benefits will spread to everyone and not just those harvesting and designing cash crops. Surely if we can get around the environmental dangers of GM crops, they will be a positive development in the long run. We just need to do what we can at this point in time to create a system where farmers are willing to plant things that would be more beneficial; and of course, where distribution of production somehow gets that increased food yield to the people who need it (probably the biggest reason that people are starving today: not lack of food, but distribution failure).

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Thomas Greene has a good opinion article over at The Register on RFID passports. It also talks a bit about biometrics. The key point is that these schemes do not protect at all against anyone using fake identification, because they can be established on fake identification. A known terrorist isn't going to get a passport in his own name (which RFID or biometric technology later identifies as belonging to the guy who signed up for it); he's going to get it in a clean, fake name (which RFID or biometric technology later identifies as belonging to the clean, harmless fellow who signed up for it).

I cannot say whether or not it is as easy to get a fake ID as Greene suggests, but I suspect he is right when he says that this sort of technology will only divert the lazier or stupider people, not the ones who know what they are doing. For the little security they provide (perhaps they even undermine true security with false promises and assumptions that we are safer than we are), these technologies just do not seem worth the invasion of privacy and, worse, the establishment of precedent for the widespread, invasive government use of such technology.

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