[freebeard]

ksa8907 — John Gilmore quotes:

"If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody."

The essence of "watching" or "looking" is focusing your attention. If you diffuse your attention to encompass everything, you end up missing everything. This is exactly what the US Government is doing with its police-state tactics (searching everyone who travels; fingerprinting every foreigner who is stupid enough to arrive; etc). I said this in a message to Declan McCullagh's "Politech" list in March 2003.

"That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee -- with physics and mathematics, not with laws -- that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications."

Another memorable part of my speech on Privacy, Technology and the Open Society from the First Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don't redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)

The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.