"So how will this new dynamic affect the fundamental principles of security, i.e. the confidentiality, integrity, and availability data in the information environments? Fundamental to this analysis is my prediction that emergent laws and hardware changes will significantly diminish the ability of users to use their computers and information for anything but ‘officially sanctioned’ activities. In other words, the PC of the future will become nothing more than a glorified (and quite expensive) dumb terminal."

The movie industry has predicted this through several movies, one of which was recent: The Minority Report. Similar to "THX 1138", "Logan's Run" and "1984", this is yet another futuristic film in which filmmakers feel that our society will become a more "controlled society", such as our government and/or the large corporations will *tell* the people what, where, how and why of things. I have noticed that our trend within society (and in reality, it's not just in America any more, 'Dorothy') is shifting more and more towards this dimly lit vision of our future.

To substantiate this trend, I have a very nasty word within the confines of computerdom: 'Palladium'. Microsoft hopes to implement their Trusted Computer Platform Architecture (TCPA), which is supposed to represent a form of Mandatory Access Control (MAC basically states in simple terms that the control mandates how much or how little control is issued to the requester; if the control determines that further control is necessary over the requester, access is denied and the requester is placed in 'security limbo' until the control either releases the requester back into their previous state, or allows the requester to proceed either to the location or provide access to the requester, or provide alternative access to a different access area). Quite simply put, TCPA is another term for 'Big Brother'.

There are several theories going around that 'Palladium' is not actually Microsoft's thought behind world domination, but rather, it is the US government dictating what/how/why/where to Microsoft -- implicating that Microsoft is a pawn, like everyone else, in a much larger game board, controlled very carefully by the US government (which leads to several other conspiracy issues, but this is well beyond the scope of this argument).

The fact remains, more and more controls are being placed, or attempted to be put into place, by corporations as well as our government, to ensure that society obeys rules and regulations. With the passing of the Homeland Security Act on Monday, November 25th, this will (most definitely) become reality.

One final note to point out regarding the re-centralization of our computing society -- with the introduction of TCPA and/or MAC into general public computing, this will allow for restrictive censorship of unwanted articles, multimedia, software (pirated or otherwise), that the 'state' (or 'control') deems 'inappropriate'. The next method of control will be the insertion of physical tokens (an encryption key enbedded within a key ring or underneath human flesh) into computing devices to record, track and maintain surveillance on all individuals into the Internet.

Welcome to 1984 people!

-r


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