[marlinspire]

He is not wrong.

Comprehensible Examples from the news that show a trend of dangerous and inevitably technically incompetent control and surveillance.

Doctorow is a great speaker, well versed and full of citations and recognises that an educated populace and individual liberty are the true wealth of nations.

You might think such a seemless and high bandwidth delivery is well rehearsed but the same seemingly effortless intersections of facts and culture occurs spontaneously in the Q & A - as a speaker virtuosic.

The crypto wars, the copyright wars, the war for general purpose computing, chilling effects on vulnerability disclosure, drm, de-CSS - these define the limits of electronic possibility.

Freedom is being eroded by totalitarian feature creep - Doctorow is one of the few technological evangelists who realised this very early on.