The End of Secrecy

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

From: "The End of Secrecy," by Ann Florini, Foreign Policy, 
Summer, 1998:

   http://jya.com/teos.htm  (39K)

IMF managing director Michel Camdessus has explained, openness 
and transparency are now economic issues, not solely political 
ones:

  As more and more evidence has come to light about the 
  adverse consequences of governance problems on economic 
  performance--among them, losses in government revenue, 
  lower quality public investment and public services, 
  reduced private investment, and the loss of public 
  confidence in government--a broader consensus has 
  emerged on the central importance of transparency and 
  good governance in achieving economic success.

Most officials in Asia seem to have accepted the virtues 
of transparency, at least in the economic field. Singaporean 
senior minister Lee Kuan Yew, stressing the importance of 
transparency in a country's financial system, recently told 
Vietnamese prime minister Phan Van Khai: "In an age of 
information technology, instant communications and computers, 
if you try to hide, you are in trouble." 

[And:]
               The Entomopter Cometh

One of the most unusual MIT designs on the drawing board is a 
four-inch-long, insect-like craft dubbed "the entomopter," 
equipped with legs for crawling through buildings or ventilation 
ducts, and flapping wings for airborne reconnaissance.

Nevertheless, no matter how small, efficient, or cost-effective 
surveillance hardware becomes, there will always be limits to 
what technology can accomplish. Indeed, it is a double-edged 
sword--witness the polemics in Washington and on the Web over 
who, if anyone, should regulate electronic encryption. From 
untappable communications to pixel-by-pixel photo and video 
editing, technology is often as good at hiding secrets as it 
is at revealing them. Without a norm of transparency, technology 
will continue to protect private information as well as ferret 
it out.

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