It was a wet and cold night but “iconoclast of the blogosphere“, Cory Doctorow, packed out a hall at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus in Vancouver on Thursday evening.

Cory is somewhat of a net celebrity, perhaps best known for his immensely popular blog, BoingBoing. For his talk, Cory took on his mantle as electronic freedom fighter to speak out about our drift towards a surveillance society.

As he rallied against digital rights management, so-called trusted computing and attempts to undermine network neutrality, the most striking anecdote came from his visit to Disneyland in the US.

Visitors to the Florida wonderland have their fingerprints taken. Cory explained that you can opt instead for showing photo ID. This is what he tried to do. Then ensued the usual, no you can’t, yes I can. The startling part of this incident came when Cory recalled how a 10-year-old in the queue piped up, saying you have to have your fingerprint taken to go to Disneyland.

Cory’s point was that we are in danger of sleepwalking into a world where privacy does not exist. The worrying thing is that “we have a generation that is growing up, used to a surveillance society”.

In his view, we are heading towards an era of continuous personal ID monitoring.

Who’s to blame for this? We need to look at ourselves, said Cory: “The last recourse of those who take away our privacy is, you agreed to let us do this.”

UPDATE: A recording of Cory’s talk is up as a stream and MP3 on the Internet Archive

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