Ginger Coons did a great interview with me last week for Concordia’s paper The Link. Good meaty policy questions ahoy!
Enhanced Driver’s Licenses are being adopted in order to comply with newly-created American regulations on what constitutes an acceptable document for crossing the border. Doctorow did not view this as a sensible excuse.
“If all the other G20 nations were jumping off western democracy and landing in a boiling pit of fascism, would you jump with them? That’s not a basis for good governance.”
But it was not all doom-and-gloom from the sometimes-dystopian writer. Doctorow revealed that he had hope for the future of information policy.
“I would like to see a kind of information bill of rights that mirrored the UN Declaration of Human Rights and that was widely accepted as kind of rote by people, where you didn’t have to explain why privacy is important or why neutral networks are important,” said Doctorow, who has pushed for Internet activity to be free from censorship or surveillance by Internet providers or governments. “I think if we got that, everything else would become easier.”
