As long as the big players in economy and politics are employing hackers to secure their systems and find loopholes, there will be three options forever:
- the gates will remain open as hackers do dispose of a let's call it lifetime "cross the border syndrome" - disclosure agreement signed yes or no;
- there will be enough money to fund protection and defense of those who "crossed the borders" (those employed hackers are NOT cheep and there are enough communities backing them up);
- internal communication in those enterprises, offices and authority bureaus will have to be restricted by including less people, access limitations and change information transport channels to others than those currently used - a very general data security requirement that processed unintentionally into public attention and awareness.
Anybody wondered how - just within hours - some financial institutions faced some issues online? There are folks out there who know their system vulnerabilities in and out by heart.
Majority of theft and sabotage happens within internal staff.
Will there be a limitation of public communication? No, it does not make any sense to me.
If someone wants to control another person or even masses, he/she needs to know the "controlled" one's reaction - thus needs to know what is being expressed as thought and speech. Control requires to survey the result to measure if objectives were met and goals were achieved. This is a system requirement.
The contrary of public expression limitations is currently occuring: each and everybody is being encouraged to speak out - via mobile phone, internet blog, navigation system, credit card, etc.
More and more blogs and social web structures are being created. Twitter is a one-way-speaking platform only. It is a time-delayed (thus controllable) platform for replies. Except if one only communicates with close friends on "rendez-vous" agreed timing, there is no real two-way communication occuring at all since messages get lost in the masses or are not read "in-time".
Twitter may appear strange at first sight, but Twitter fits completely into the "let them speak out and let us maybe filter what comes in as utterances - but at least we may analyze public opinion and social trends" concept.
Where we might see limitations coming into picture is the re-distribution of these individual utterances to public. This re-distribution may be filtered / censured / delayed ("twitter over capacity").
But then again - we don't have to forget the hackers of this world, competing for new objects and objectives.
Plus: a machine is only as intelligent as the one sitting in front of it.
I am not afraid AT ALL.
