Not too far off! ;-)
"The Absence of Trust in the Network
At one level the digital network is a new technological infrastructure. But at another, it is something quite familiar: a form of society. People chat and bicker, dwell and move on, seek out resources, buy and sell, make friends and entertain themselves in any manner of ways. Everyone is invited to say what they want to and to browse as they like in a digital continuum that extends globally.
Yet there is something a little different here too. Rather like in the Wild West, a person entering the cybersaloon does so with a little trepidation. Every time we log on there is this nagging fear that something horrible might happen that we cannot do anything about. Maybe something will arrive in an e-mail that looks friendly, but isn’t. We feel nervous when we disclose details about ourselves to people we don’t know and can’t see. We find we are unable to download content like movies and music – at least legally. In fact, whichever direction a person wants to move valuable information, they find they can’t do it safely. Somehow something is lost in the intangibility of every interaction.
We miss that handshake.
And with good reason. The combination of processing power, bandwidth, vast storage capabilities, and people’s natural curiosity, which are often such a potent force for good, may just as easily be turned to mischief. In a connected world, anyone may cause harm, even inadvertently. I am reminded of the anecdote of the boy who hacked into the Pentagon’s command and control center a number of years back, all the while thinking he’d found his way into some kind of marvelous computer game: hmmm, missiles! And then there are others whose intentions are indeed malicious. We have all learned the new network lexicon that speaks of hackers and crackers, of viruses and worms, and of denial of service attacks. The notion that freedom of expression and access to information are unadulterated goods finds itself tested in the extreme.
We are straining towards a new principle: something that unites this desire for freedom, with tools that give us a sense of security, identity, reputation, privacy, ownership, and community, as well as a transparent medium of payment. It is this hodgepodge of features that Bill Gates was describing when, at the beginning of 2002, he talked about ushering in a new era of “trustworthy computing”.
The crux of my argument is that in order to accommodate this need a new, parallel, trust framework resembling that with which we are familiar outside the virtual world needs to be put in place within it. It won’t replace the public internet as we know it. But it will flow along the same pipes, and end up in the same devices. This framework, which within society manifests itself in our everyday interactions, in local customs, laws and in a global financial system, will need to be translated into the encrypted language of the network.
This will be achieved by making two structural changes to the network architecture: first, through alterations to the design of the user’s device; and second, through crystallization of the role of the device’s user. Both of these changes will be built at the periphery of the network, and based on the inclusion of a new specialized chip, or sequence of chips, in the heart of every connected machine.
The implications of this change will be profound. Not only will it resolve the digital conundrum that has so perplexed the network’s designers; it will also lay the foundations for a more pragmatic digital society. Users will have the ability to draw and sign a contract, to identify themselves authoritatively, to own digital goods and maintain rights of privacy. New content, applications and services will fill the bitstream; money will zip willy-nilly through the network; and at last the construction of the broadband infrastructure will be resumed. Indeed, when we examine it carefully, we discover that the tools with which we build trustworthiness in the network are the same ones that are used to construct the condition we know as Liberty outside it. Cyberspace merely lacks a vehicle for its expression."
| 