Quote of the day - or maybe of the decade [Telecom]

The following is excerpted from a court finding which is published at

"Neither party in this case has acted like mature adults should act. Nor is either party in this case blameless for turning this into a federal case when it never should have been litigated in the first place."

It seems the courts are running out of patience with a certain kind of lawsuit: actions which question attempts by school bureaucrats to implement electronic surveilance technology so as to avoid spending money for adequate staff levels.

This lawsuit is relevant to telecom because it's about an technology which will become increasingly common until it is ubiquitous: the electronic verification of identity coupled with instant retrieval of every fact, factoid, or rumor in any database in the world. Get ready for the future, because within our lifetime, every imigration agent, border patrolman, visa office, merchant, employer, banker, and politician in the developed world will have at their fingertips anything and everything you'd rather keep private.

Bill Horne