[Vendors] shouldn’t be sold a bill of goods that they’re going to be able to make a pile of money in 1995, because there are risks that need to be well understood, and the opportunities are still relatively small. On the other hand, if we’re not looking at it now, we’re not going to be prepared to make money when the risk/return ratio goes the other way.
Some Internet users say putting the manifesto on the World Wide Web may help the FBI find the Unabomber … People who know each other through electronic messaging and online services – could ferret out the identity of the Unabomber.
We created virtual reality on paper for years. We did all that on a piece of dead tree … We must try to build a platform to transform the book.
The danger … is that people will withdraw within their walled communities and never again venture into the Internet’s public spaces. It’s a process similar to the one that created the suburbs and replaced the great cities with shopping malls and urban sprawl. The magic of the Net is that it thrusts people together in a strange, new world, one in which they get to rub virtual shoulders with characters they might otherwise never meet. The challenge for the citizens of cyberspace – as the battles to control the Internet are joined and waged – will be to carve out safe, pleasant places to work, play and raise their kids without losing touch with the freewheeling, untamable soul that attracted them to the Net in the first place.
Privacy technology, whether used for electronic payments, voting, or other public expression, is the electronic equivalent of a free market and democracy. People will come to insist on it as an informational human right.
You will put a chip card into a user-friendly electronic device of your own choosing, whether on your desk, in your living room, or in your pocket.
Security is simply the protection of interests … With electronic cash, just as with paper cash today, it will be the responsibility of government to protect against systemic risk.
Breakthroughs in modern cryptography indicate that one day it will be universal and simple … Anonymity is scary stuff … What are the benefits and the risks? Even if we don’t want it, can we stop it?
As the power and scope of cyberspace become more and more obvious, its commercial potential grows … The growth of the Internet will be further boosted by recently passed federal legislation designed to bolster the development of a digital “information infrastructure.”
If the trend toward identifier-based smart cards continues, personal privacy will be increasingly eroded. But in this conflict between organizational security and individual liberty, neither side emerges as a clear winner. Each round of improved identification techniques, sophisticated data analysis or extended linking can be frustrated by widespread noncompliance or even legislated limits, which in turn may engender attempts at further control.