The larger question

[nancylebov]

This reminds me of something I've been wondering about.

Are we moving into an era of open-source warfare? A time when just about everything except the plans in people's heads are public? Or, a little less generously, only face-to-face communications have a chance of being private? [1]

I'm interested in both fiction and non-fiction speculation on the subject.

[1] This reminds me of Varley's "The Persistence of Vision", in which a community of blind and deaf people develop Touch, a language which is entirely skin-to-skin. It would probably have better odds of privacy, but I'm no longer optimistic enough about people to think that Touch would reliably lead to benevolence.

Link thanks to Harold Feld at Facebook.

Comments

[twistedchick]

'Moving into'? We're there. We only just found that out.

And Touch would only be private if a sighted person were not there watching them. For instance, it is not hard to 'listen in' on people speaking in ASL, if one knows a few signs or fingerspelling; it's rude, but it's far from impossible. Happens on the Metro all the time.

I have been reading Lindsey Davis's Master and God, her book on the reign of Domitian, as seen from the viewpoints of a Praetorian Guard and a woman who is a hairdresser to some of the Imperial family. The amount of information gathering, over the long term, and how it was used are chilling. I'm not going to draw comparisons; Obama is not a paranoid emperor. However, he has more casual power over people's lives -- and has used it to assassinate individuals 'deemed dangerous to the State'-- than any Caesar.

[nancylebov]

My impression is that a good bit is still secret. Do you believe that the opposing sides in current wars get all the information they want in a timely fashion?

I think you could get a good bit of privacy with Touch-- for example, A is finger-talking into B's palm. B's fingers are curved over A's fingers.

For that matter, a layer of cloth would block off visual surveillance. Darkness wouldn't be enough to frustrate infra-red snooping.

[twistedchick]

Well, the privacy didn't work so well for fingerspelling when we used to use it in college. About 30 of us learned it because several friends were blind and some had hearing problems.

And a layer of cloth would be an absolute signal to anyone else around that Something Private Was Being Communicated.

[nancylebov]

The metadata problem strikes again!

I'm pretty sure Touch isn't fingerspelling any more than ASL is, but I don't know how much that would help with privacy.

[sgsguru]

Sounds like a music cue to me ...

Interesting factoid: the football huddle was invented by the team from Gallaudet University so the opposing team couldn't see their sign language.