WHY YOU SHOULD FEEL INCREASINGLY VULNERABLE

Benjamin Wittes & Gabriella Blum, The Future of Violence: Roberts and Germs, Hackers and Drones--Confronting a New Age of Threat (New York: Basic Books, 2015) ("[A[ kind law of technological development: technologies that distribute power and capability will also tend to distribute dependency, exposure, and vulnerability." Id. at 48. "The basic problem is inescapable. Any time a technology radically enhances what people can do and thus gives people the ability to exert power over one another--by enabling them to kill one another at a distance in the case of guns, to glean an enormous amount of information about one another in the case of the mosaic*, to watch other remotely in the case of domestic drones, and to manipulate the basic generic structures of the foods we eat in the case of genetically modified crops--there will be disputes over that technology's use. And government at some level has to mediate those disputes if the conflicts do not resolve on their own in a fashion that wins widespread acceptance." Id. at 220. *"Your life and that of every other person in an advanced industrialized country produces a mosaic of digital information stored on public and private computer servers around the world. Most of the tiles of your personal mosaic do not reside in your hands. They consists of the electronic fingerprints you leave with increasing frequency over the course of your day-to-day existence on computers, controlled by third parties: they are the websites you visit, the toll booths you pass through, the purchases you make online or with credit cards, the prescriptions you fill, the phone numbers you dial, the e-mails you send, the library books you check out, the specify pages you have read on your Kindle, the restaurants at which you make online reservations, the steps yo take as measured by your Fitbit, the photos you post on Facebook, and the photos that others post of you." Id. at 45-46. "Modern technology enables individuals to wield the destructive power of states. Individuals, including you personally, can potentially be attacked with impunity from anywhere in the world. Technology makes less relevant many of the traditional concepts around which our laws and political organization for security have evolved. National borders, jurisdictional boundaries, citizenship, and the distinction between national and international, between act of war and crime, and between state and private action all offer divides less sharp than they used to be. Our nation--and every nation--can face attack through channels controlled and operated not by governments but by the private sector and by means against which governments lack the ability to defend, making private actors pivotal to defense." Id. at 5.).