While the digital divide might bring up the idea that enterprises will be able to sell more and more computers during the next years another truth looks as if there was no hope for a certain percentage of the population to get out of their marginalization, their position of being "have nots".
Studies show that the issue of different colors of skin play a role in this, but more than "racial" issues it is income, age and education that decides about the have and have nots.
There exist ~ 103 million households in the USA.
~6 million do not even have telephone access. Why should they care about computers?
The digital divide cuts the world into centers and peripheries, not into nations, as it runs through the boarder between the North and the South as well as through nations.
The most different institutions with various interests in their background work in that field; not rarely paid by governments, which are interested in inhabitants, connected to the net and economy.
see also:
Searching information about the digital divide one will find informations saying that it is growing all the time whereas other studies suggest the contrary, like this one
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The more so-called security measures are taken the more control and the less freedom is granted. Whereas criminals are flexible in their computer work/digital existence, the average person cannot be. So it is her/him who gets punished with an increase of control.
Of course security can be in favor of the population as well - and this is the case if cryptography is legal so that everyone has access to it to protect his/her data. This one needs for e-commerce, secure payments and transmission of private data, mostly e-mails or access to websites where one needs a password. E-mails are nothing else than postcards, letters without envelopes. Without encryption they are easy to open, read and trace back, even without knowing the password. Rumors that Echelon works with a list of key-words, controlling any e-mail in the world and reacting to words of that list, led to actions like the Jam Eschelon Day, last time held on October 21st, 1999, to confuse the espionage system.
for more information on Jam Eschelon Day see:
But the respect for privacy stands for an essential values in democratic societies.
So, how can it be regarded a governmental risk?
At a conference:
"How many people here fear a greater risk
from government abuses of power
than from criminal activity?"
The majority raised their hands,
one participant shouted "What's the difference?"
(anonymous)
If governments really care for the people and want to fight against cybercriminality they should rather support the work on the latest technologies for encryption than to restrict their access. Or even better: they should not intervene at all - to make sure they do not build in any trapdoors. Though it is already too late for discussion like this one as the trapdoors are already part of most of the key-systems. Rumors about PGP and trapdoors do not help the confidence in cryptology.
for information about the risks of cryptography see:
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Calculators are machines for automatically performing arithmetical operations and certain mathematical functions. Modern calculators are descendants of a digital arithmetic machine devised by
Galileo Galilee (1564-1642), the Italian Mathematician and Physicist is called the father of Enlightenment. He proofed the laws of the free fall, improved the technique for the telescope and so on. Galilee is still famous for his fights against the Catholic Church. He published his writings in Italian instead of writing in Latin. Like this, everybody could understand him, which made him popular. As he did not stop talking about the world as a ball (the Heliocentric World System) instead of a disk, the Inquisition put him on trial twice and forbid him to go on working on his experiments.