But they may not have the necessary regulatory tools, either technical or legal. They may not even understand the problem of the uncontrolled growth in system complexity of the infrastructures or markets they regulate, or recognize the phenomenon of emergent properties of complex systems. They may not have the problem on their political agendas. But the mechanisms are there, and if society, public or private, chooses not to use them, then it must live with the problems until the cost of suffering is generally recognized as greater than the cost of using them. This may be one area where the fix to a technology problem may be more technology.
Systems have a right to be assured that their users are who they say they are.
We need more air gaps as much as we need more connectivity. Information must have permanently attached metadata to identify its owner and the terms and conditions under which it can be transmitted or used. People who yield up personal information to sites or systems lacking privacy policies must expect the worst eventually, just as walking in dark alleys in bad parts of town eventually leads to disaster. These same issues will be reformulated in terms of genetic information. One s genes are private property, and their release should be under conditions imposed by their owner.