About 30 years ago, when I first got involved with the Net (Usenet; thanks to USF and Spaf for the link, and Larry Strickland at SPJC for servers), one of the topics that everyone loved to rant about were supposed plans from the Neilsen Companies to put cameras on set top boxes and use them to get better data about how many people were watching TV. There was the expected public meltdown, as the word got 'round -- even given how impractical it would have been to implement with that day's tech -- and I was, frankly surprised that it didn't recur when Microsoft started putting cameras atop videogame consoles, in our much better connected world. In light of the Snowden fracas, it has now, finally, recurred: http://broadcastengineering.com/regulation/we-are-watching-you-act-introduce... This is another example, I think, of a thing that only a very small number of people have thought proactively about over the years, but that I think network engineering people ought to be at the forefront of that group: I call it capability creep, by analogy to scope creep; it's the situation where because of changes in technologies only peripherally related to your own, yours suddenly acquires previously unexpected capabilities, for either good or evil. Ours -- high speed, pervasive, networking -- is probably the most common enabling technology which has this effect, and while we can't exactly just shut the routers off and go home, and while people spend a whole lot of time ignoring us on such topics (I can't count the toldjaso's from the last 3 decades), I still think it's a topic we ought to focus purposeful thinking on as we go about our lives of planning and executing the next generation of networks. And the next. And the next. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274