Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.

This latest entry in the Casey Anthony saga highlights failures in both areas:

Assertions by the prosecution that Casey Anthony conducted extensive computer searches on the word “chloroform” were based on inaccurate data, a software designer who testified at the trial said Monday.

The designer, John Bradley, said Ms. Anthony had visited what the prosecution said was a crucial Web site only once, not 84 times, as prosecutors had asserted …

The finding of 84 visits was used repeatedly during the trial to suggest that Ms. Anthony had planned to murder her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, who was found dead in 2008. Ms. Anthony, who could have faced the death penalty, was acquitted of the killing on July 5.

In a nutshell: the software used to track Anthony’s online movements produced radically bad data, and the prosecutors failed to disclose this after it was brought to their attention.

“But through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration, [the Chinese] reached a conclusion: the Web is fundamentally controllable,” the person said.

This isn’t particularly surprising: the Chinese have been very successful at clamping down on internet access inside their own country, and savage in their punishment of even slight online deviations from the enforced orthodoxy. Nonetheless: they’re delusional, perhaps wilfully so. You can monitor the internet, you can shut down pieces of it, you can block it, you can use it for your own propagandistic purposes. But you can’t control it.

Nonetheless, this sentiment isn’t confined to Chinese authoritarianism: various media/government organs in the US have very clearly demonstrated that they find a free and open internet anathema. Whether we’re talking about the COICA internet censorship bill making its way through the senate; or the recent due-process-free, nuclear-option takedown of 82 websites for alleged copyright violations; or the unhinged, insane rantings of congressmen and pundits over WikiLeaks’ latest document dump — there’s no doubt that the people who run the country would like nothing more than to have a big red button they could press to just shut it all down.

That’s not going to happen. As WikiLeaks’ latest moves to scatter itself across the network have demonstrated, any entity composed of data is a kind of decentralized everywhere creature — you can try to shatter it, but its pieces will just scatter, and replicate, and find a way to reconstruct themselves.

But even if you can’t kill data, you can hurt its shepherds. The death threats against Assange are just the most extreme examples of what happens when you defy a government/industrial combine accustomed to operating in complete secrecy: he’s been accused of everything from treason¹ to terrorism. “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong,” said Voltaire, and WikiLeaks is working diligently to piss off pretty much every government in the world. And if you’re going to defy the powerful, it makes sense to draw your strength not from power, but from ubiquity.

“Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.” As soft-spoken a revolutionary as you’re ever likely to see.

You have discussed this possibility only in the context of the current detainees at Guantanamo Bay, yet we must be aware of the precedent that such a system would establish. While the handling of these detainees by the Bush Administration was particularly egregious, from a legal as well as human rights perspective, these are unlikely to be the last suspected terrorists captured by the United States. Once a system of indefinite detention without trial is established, the temptation to use it in the future would be powerful. And, while your administration may resist such a temptation, future administrations may not.

Exactly, and obviously. It beggars belief that this has to be pointed out. Given the choice between an illegal program of incarcerating people without trial forever, and a legal program of incarcerating people without trial forever, I’d pick the former, in a heartbeat. But are those really our only choices? Sanctioned or unsanctioned outrages against basic human decency?

The other notable software feature added in Kindle 2 is one that mostly represents potential. At the new unit’s introduction, Bezos said that the device could sync both content and a user’s location within that content across multiple devices. At the moment, that means different versions of the Kindle, but it works eerily well. It was strange to download a book that I had started on generation one and have it open to the very page I had been reading on generation two, an experience our Editor in Chief Ken Fisher also found spooky.

Look, I’ve been accused of being paranoid before, and maybe I am, but the modern world is, without a doubt, a paranoia-generating machine. George Orwell envisioned the surveillance state arriving via heavy-handed government intervention — TVs that watch you, children who are trained to spy on their parents, etc. And we’re certainly getting some of that, with Britain at the vanguard. But what’s also happening, in the background, is actually a lot more insidious, and possibly more dangerous: our privacy is being systematically violated (a) by corporations who slip past our natural defenses through the expedient of insanely cool technological awesomeness; and (b) with our consent.

I’ll admit it — I think the new Kindle is absolutely gorgeous, and I’d like nothing better than to read all my books on a wafer thin slab of lovely. But doing so means not just that Amazon knows exactly what books you own; not just that they know exactly when you’re reading them; it means that they know exactly what part of them you’re reading at all times. Think about that. You come across some of the naughty bits in Lady Chatterly’s Lover, a bell goes off in Amazon Central Control, someone picks up the phone and calls the Unauthorized Lasciviousness bureau of the FBI, and ten minutes later a couple of jackboots show up at your doorstep, tsk tsking menacingly. That’s a silly scenario, of course, but it’s possible. When in human history has it been so easy to look over everyone’s shoulder at the same time?

Amazon isn’t the only offender here, or even the scariest. Gmail reads all your email so that it can generate appropriate ad content; Comcast monitors your incoming network data to look for “illegal” downloads; Tivo keeps track of your viewing habits, for “aggregate” analysis. I don’t think any of these guys — except for maybe Comcast — have any malicious intent here. Google still seems like a good and upright company, and TiVo is still just pretty much wall-to-wall awesome. But any assessment of their capabilities that doesn’t take the future into account, when either they — or the government agency that’s taken an unhealthy interest in its citizenry — decide to use their powers for evil, is a flawed, and dangerous, assessment.

At the moment, Amazon is doing its very best to keep people from buying the Kindle — by charging $360 for it, and $10 a pop for books, in the midst of a scary recession — so this particular danger isn’t immediate. But the price will come down, and it feels like paper books — ie, books that require an actual spy to be actually looking physically over your shoulder — are on their way out. Maybe by the time that happens we’ll have come up with some way to enjoy the fruits of our progress without sacrificing our privacy to them. But I’m not hopeful.

But the magic portal is angry. It emits a series of high-pitched beeps. Beep beep, it says. Beep beep BEEP. God damn it.

The TSA man holds out his hands, and his gaze hardens into that paradoxical mixture of ennui and hatred unique to frustrated bureaucrats whose soul-deadening routines has been disrupted.

Pockets, he says. I thrust my hands into my pockets. They emerge with a phone.

Bag, he says, pointing at a box full of transparent plastic bags. I slip the phone into one of them and drop it on the belt that has already whisked my backpack and shoes away. The TSA drone impales me with his gaze. His gaze says: If you anger the portal again so help me god I will eat your fucking liver.

I step through. I can feel the portal’s distaste sweep over me, but that’s all. I am too pitiable a creature for anger. The TSA man spares me one more look, and then his eyes focus past me, at the next supplicant.

I am forgotten, but not forgiven. I collect my things, put my shoes back on, pry my phone out of the belt rollers, and proceed chastened into the belly of the airport.