Travelling across a Vast Machine

Lunch over IP: Travelling across a Vast Machine: "In recent years, a typical response to the observation that electronic monitoring systems are becoming too powerful and are been misused (in particular by governments - for example the monitoring by the US government of the international banking transactions going through the SWIFT clearinghouse, or the widespread phone wiretapping in Italy) is that "honest people have nothing to fear". On the surface, that's commonsensical. In reality, that notion is a fallacy. Even honest people have much to be concerned with: mistakes, homonymy, inaccuracies, stolen identities, abuses, discrimination, the growing authoritarian temptation that's seeping into many governments to use monitoring technology just because it exists (ready-made rationale in this times of generalized fear: "to protect the honest citizen"), the risk that private or criminal organization get access to data and misuse them (to deny health insurance coverage, for example).

John Twelve Hawks - the pseudonym of a mysterious writer - has written a pretty good novel on this very notion that "honest people have nothing to fear", demonstrating how untrue it is. It's called "The Traveller", was published last year (I'm catching up on my reading backlog) and is the story of a powerful organization that wants to control society through the "Vast Machine" (an all-encompassing, next-gen Internet that reaches into every database, every surveillance camera, every bank transaction, every reservation system) and of the few that refuse this uniformity and try to resist by living "off the grid" (not using computers, credit cards, etc) and using the ultimate weapon: their humanity."

(Via Lunch over IP.)