Security, Liberty, and Electronic Communications

We live in perilous times. We live in times where a dirty bomb going off in lower Manhattan is not unimaginable. We live in times where the CIA interrogations of al Qaeda leaders were so harsh that the FBI would not let its agent participate [36]. We live in times when security and liberty are both endangered.We also live in times of unimaginable technical creativity. It is faster to use Instant Messaging to query a colleague halfway across the world than it is to walk down the hallway and ask the question, when Google can search four billion web pages faster than the time it takes to pull the right volume of the Oxford English Dictionary off the library shelf. We live surrounded by a plethora of communicating and computing devices – telephones, PDAs, cell phones, laptops, PCs, Computers – and this is only the beginning of the communications revolution.