New technologies are always a mixed blessing, their potential for good carrying with it the risk of evil. The deep challenge for a democracy is to develop legal rules, social practices and institutional arrangements that, at some reasonable cost, separate good from bad behavior. The exponential improvement in computation and communication technologies over the past few decades has posed this challenge in an acute form. Both large bureaucracies and determined individuals can now collect and organize huge amounts of information—and all of it, in one sense or another, is about all of us.
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