RE: Why to Care about Others' Security

[fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham)]

i wrote-

> | 1) The more people protect their privacy, the less profit there is in
> | privacy invasion, so that there will be fewer people doing it and
> | the techniques and infrastructure of spying might develop more
> | slowly.

& Mike Markley replied-

> It seems that the more people protect their privacy the greater the 
> profit will be in finding ways to invade that privacy. When all kinds 
> of information is available in more or less public places there is 
> little, if any, reason to pay people to get this information. On the 
> other hand if your information is closely guarded then it costs a lot 
> more to get that information.

I think you're effectively looking at the profit in an individual act
of spying instead of the profit in the whole spying "industry."
(I'm using the word "spying" only because it's short.)

Another thing to remember is that we're talking about information
*collecting* technologies, like merging mailing lists, rather than 
code breaking.  Most "spying" is really cheap & easy nowadays.

There's always a distribution of valuable information at various 
levels of difficulty of access.  Privacy technology in common use 
would push masses of information from the easy-to-get category to
harder-to-get categories.

That means there's much more valuable information in the hard-to-get
category.  But that information *costs* much more to get, too.
The total information that can be collected at a given total cost
is less.

So less info would be espied, but I think we're discussing whether
spying technology would be stimulated or depressed overall.

Certainly there will be demand for info even after it becomes
expensive.  Sometimes people will be willing to pay higher costs.
That means good news for middlemen who specialize in hard spying.
But what about the spy industry overall?

There are two reasons I think it would be depressed.  One is
that espionage is synergystic.  You can make information more
useful by combining it with other information.  If less total
information is available then the average chunk of information
is less valuable--and so less worth collecting.

The other reason is that although some information will fetch
higher prices as it becomes more costly, much more information
will simply become not worth fetching.  So even though there
will be more high-priced spying going on, there will be less
money flowing in the spying industry overall.

This is my theory.  Which is mine.  (Actually I probably stole it
from Eric Hughes, but what do you expect from a punk.)

-fnerd
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