The author concludes that computing technology is making it much easier to perform both kinds, a lot of it is going on and more can be expected. The author says he does not argue that surveillance is intrinsically evil or that it should be ruled out altogether, but argues that much of what is in fact now going on is in general a bad thing, especially the mass surveillance. He concludes that privacy and civil liberties protections in place in most countries are inadequate to protect against these new surveillance techniques. The author says that he feels people working in computing, due to their special knowledge, have some special responsibility to consider privacy implications of their work, evaluate safeguards, and lobby for effective ones. A local newscast carried a story on a Herpes research project under way at Baylor College of Medicine, and displayed a phone number for volunteers to call - with appropriate assurances of confidentiality.
People are a lot less cautious when they initiate a contact than when they are contacted.
I don't have a magic answer for designers of services - it is very hard to design a service that is at all hard to spoof if the clients aren't at least a little bit cautious. It was at night and the public would not have been in immediate danger even in the daytime, but the incident nevertheless caused quite a ruckus. The tiger had no trouble going through it, and there was no indication that it was defective, nor that any other tiger would have had any trouble going through any other door of like design. Apparently quite a few nominally professional people in the world think that standards excuse them from thinking. A society that depends upon any mechanism for its own proper functioning, cannot tolerate, much less encourage, any tampering with the intended operation of that mechanism.