Well, I have managed to correlate several – seemingly unrelated – things again to my own surprise. Think for a sec. about the way the unipolar governing of the world by — currently — the US, personal freedom/privacy, the power provided to the world by electronics and computing. I just watched Colossus: The Forbin Project, a cheesy 1970 sci-fi film about a computer similar to SkyNet in Terminator, that decides to take over the world: fortunately not immediately killing the whole of mankind plus Colossus, the computer at hand, joins forces with an equivalent Soviet computer called Guardian and combine their forces to achieve total control over the world. In the movie, the computer demands that its creator, a certain Dr. Forbin, is being put under constant surveillance.

Think for a second how easy it is today, 33 years after the release of that movie to monitor someone’s actions. Most personal financial transactions take place using credit or debit cards or at the very least ATMs. Registrations everywhere provide information as to someone’s personal details. And computerised bank networks as well as digital telephone exchanges retain (in the post 11th September world) extensive logs about people’s phonecalls. As if this was not enough, anyone living in a large city will have noticed the hundreds of CCTV cameras everywhere. I am sure this is more evident in the States than Europe or the rest of the world. The recent Verizon appeal turned-down, to not reveal their subscribers’ identities to RIAA increasingly worries me about how Orwellian the future could end up. A lot of people have written about privacy on the internet and how the Verizon case — at least in the case — will set a precedent that could literally end up forcing ISPs to reveal user data to anyone claiming they have broken the law *before* they prove it!
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It is not the first time I am writing about my frustration with internet connectivity in Greece. In a country such as Greece, with more than 60% of its land being in the form of islands or mountainous terrain, making human communication and transportation difficult, one would think that advanced telecoms would be available to the masses; one would also reasonably expect that those services would be cheap, so that most people could enjoy them. Unfortunately, this is far from true; Despite being an EU country, I am sorry to say that Greek transportation and connectivity is among the worst I’ve seen in *any* western country. The roads are neglected as much as a road can be, several not tourist-friendly places are extremely hard to reach — especially islands — and, last but not least, communication services are years behind the rest of Europe. And mentioning ‘Europe’ does not limit this to the EU: Even countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Cyprus, some with much smaller ‘target markets’ than Greece, where people have much lower income and are not at all acquainted with technology the way Western people are, enjoy much better telecommunications, be it for data or voice. Something like this is completely incomprehensible to me.
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