The success of electronic mail has caused a bottleneck that can only be freed by a new approach to how we send and manage messages … Web browsers [will] eventually be built into most applications instead of run as stand-alone applications as they typically are today.
Europe is poised to benefit from the boom in information networks … Construction of an information society in Europe is not an option but a necessity.
PCs will not turn into dumb terminals and will need intelligence and storage capacity … You’ll still need a way of storing the applications that you download from the network and your personal data … PCs will be transformed … You’ll find that the PC will take on new forms; wallet PCs will be carried around and you’ll see kiosk PCs and portable PCs that will all be hooked up into a unified network that provides a rich set of applications.
We believe the world is moving from a desktop point of view to a network-centric point of view, and when you have a network-centric point of view, you don’t need a device as complicated as the PC … You can get a terminal for as much as $400-$500 … PC is a ridiculous device; the idea is so complicated and expensive. What the world really wants is to plug into a wall to get electronic power and plug in to get data.
Through “virtual work spaces,” which he said would be sponsored by large corporations and which could replace physical office buildings, executives working at home would be able to gain access to geographically dispersed colleagues, outside experts, literature, prototypes and products.
Cyberspace will require, and in turn generate, billions of dollars in economic activity, creating, among other things, the largest unreal estate market the world has ever known. Indeed, the cultural and economic impact of a fully deployed cyberspace system is unmeasurable.
Cyberspace can be seen as extending an inexorable process that began a long, long time ago and which gained new impetus earlier this century, namely the dematerialization of buildings.
With Clipper/Skipjack, there is a lot that the combined forces of government will be able to do to monitor all aspects of your behavior without getting a warrant. Between the monitoring capacities of the NSA, the great data-sieves of the Department of Energy, and the fact that, in use, each chip would continually broadcast the whereabouts of its owner, the government would soon be able to isolate just about every perpetrator among us. I assume you’re neither a drug-user nor a terrorist, but are you ready for this? Is your nose that clean? Can it be prudent to give government this kind of corrupting power?
France doesn’t have a Bill of Rights to violate, which it seems to me that restriction of cryptography in America would do on several counts.
Were the enshrined threats – drug dealers, terrorists, child molesters, and foreign enemies – sufficiently and presently imperiling to justify fundamentally compromising all future transmitted privacy? … It seems to me that America’s greatest health risks derive from the drugs that are legal, a position the statistics overwhelmingly support. And then there’s terrorism, to which we lost a total of two Americans in 1992, even with the World Trade Center bombing, only six in 1993. I honestly can’t imagine an organized ring of child molesters, but I suppose one or two might be out there. And the last time we got into a shooting match with another nation, we beat them by a kill ratio of about 2,300 to 1. Even if these are real threats, is enhanced wire-tap the best way to combat them?