Could all this hacking bring about a new science fiction style era in real life?

defyalllogic said:

With all the super breaches of security (based on scale rather than awesomeness), the unreliability of the cloud due to policy or malfunction, and the US thinking about National ID (they do this every once in a while) like the EU... My eager science fiction adoring mind is wondering what if...

Of course I could see a would where we're all licensed from birth and this could be used for everything from immigration reform to age verification. Your Medical reccords, cable bill, and internet records, and credit cards would all be linked to your National ID

I guess it might be big brother-esque but I could totally see it being something people would opt into at first for convenience then...

Am I the only one who starts thinking science fiction when reading all this news about hack after hack and cloud fail after cloud fail?

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Nothing gets my gears spinning like the eventual effects of cyber terrorism (not that I'd be actually involved in it). At a point in my WIP that's got a government appointed agency trying to deal with constant cyber threats to their infrastructure.

We had ID cards mooted over here for a while, but the idea died a long, slow, lonely death. Nobody really wanted them except for politicians, especially when it turned out that they'd cost you like £100 to get one. The cost to the nation was going to be in the billions, and if you looked closely at all the admin that would need to be done to keep the ID register current it rather looked like it'd be impossible to run.

Worse, there didn't seem to be any pressing reason to have ID cards in the first place. There was a lot of chuntering about terrorism, but then the thing about terrorists is they tend not to lie about their identities, they just pretend not to be terrorists.

Then there were disingenuous fairy tales about making things a lot easier if you only had one ID document, which tended to make me think "Hello? I already own a passport." The convenience thing could only be manufactured: what'd have to happen would be that something that you can now do with a passport or a driving licence (like, say, open a bank account) would now require an ID card. You'd have to artificially make things we do routinely today less convenient, or even impossible, in order to make ID cards look useful by comparison.

And of course a single ID card means all your eggs are in one basket; if that fails, everything is up for grabs.

I also don't think any sort of national ID scheme does much to help prevent Sony-type hacks. It'd just seem to add an extra bit of data to steal when you slip past their security.

What it does make me think is, I'm not going to rely on cloud-based storage for any of my stuff, thanks very much...

defyalllogic said:

Of course I could see a would where we're all licensed from birth and this could be used for everything from immigration reform to age verification. Your Medical reccords, cable bill, and internet records, and credit cards would all be linked to your National ID

I guess it might be big brother-esque but I could totally see it being something people would opt into at first for convenience then...

Am I the only one who starts thinking science fiction when reading all this news about hack after hack and cloud fail after cloud fail?

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You're talking about the possibility that social science fiction tales like Brave New World and 1984 might come true? Well, yeah, it's possible. That's one reason those novels were written, as cautionary tales about the way the world could be headed.

But since we have the novels, the dangers depicted in them are known and labelled and our society does its best to try and prevent them from happening. In this way, science fiction serves as an immunization for society. So I wouldn't worry too much about dangers that have been dragged out into the light of day. Worry about what the sci-fi authors may have missed.

From what I can see, our various governments are almost bankrupt and getting more inept and powerless with each passing year. It's the big corporates you ought to be worrying about rather than the governments...

Agreed, it's the corporations we should worry about. The other day I saw a car insurance ad offering a discount if you let them install a monitoring device to "prove how safe a driver you are"...

I'm sure you've read or seen that quote typically attributed to Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

I kind of see us living in a science fiction style already. Be it the government or the corporations someone always knows something about everyone. (Unless of course you stay at home, fill out no tax information, do not use the internet, and produce all your own water and power.) I came to terms with that long ago, but the technology is quickly catching up to the Big Brothers who have that information. I do not think what the future holds will be like anything we have read or seen. I think it will be something just different enough to persuade everyone to agree.

There's so much other fascinating stuff going on with computers right now, a rehash of universal electronic id is interesting, but not top on my list for priority imagination access.


I do consider the social implications of opting-in to "free" services like facebook a very interesting area, though.

Unless of course you stay at home, fill out no tax information, do not use the internet, and produce all your own water and power

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If only we could all be ruggedly self-reliant...

defyalllogic said:

Of course I could see a would where we're all licensed from birth and this could be used for everything from immigration reform to age verification. Your Medical reccords, cable bill, and internet records, and credit cards would all be linked to your National ID

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I know this isn't what you're referring to, but your description made me think, "Wait, like a social security number?" Cuz all that's already tied to our SS numbers in the US... It just isn't fully automated yet, or all on one convenient card.

There really isn't that big of a difference to me, the government already has ways to access that all legally if they really need to.

The Nat ID wouldn't be the problem, it would be any new laws that might violate
personal rights. And I don't think the two necessarily go hand in hand.

That said, sure, that kind of future is possible. Heck, we've experienced periods like that
in the past--remember the Holocaust?

Though that doesn't address the digital terrorism aspect.