Independence Day 2012

For my Independence Day post I have picked three quotes that span the last thousand years or so of the move from kings and tyrants to representative government and the rule of law.

“To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”
Magna Carta clause 40 of 1215 charter

All we have of freedom, all we use or know –
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.
Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue, 1899

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.
Erma Bombeck

As more of our communication and property migrate into cyberspace we will need to re-learn the hard lessons of our ancestors about privacy and security in this new world. I suspect within two or three decades we will look back with incredulity that companies like Facebook and Google were permitted to read our mail and develop more extensive dossiers on us than even the East German Stasi would have dreamed of being able to assemble, all to sell advertising.

Please consider if the work you are doing is helping to preserve and extend our privacy, security, and freedom in cyberspace or is undermining them.

“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation”
Alasdair Gray