waters. Their job isn’t easy, and it’s far from an exact science. While
the results of Fed action can be painful for many of us, we can be
reasonably certain these actions are taken with the good of the country,
as a whole, in mind. Still, with such enormous power concentrated in
such a small, isolated sphere, the temptation to reap oceans of illegal
profit can never be far from the surface. And the stories one can
write!
of them, to the best of my research ability, are perfectly plausible if
they are not already in full-scale use or perhaps even, if you can
believe it, obsolete. The numerous benefits of computer technology are
undeniably significant; however, with benefits of such scale, there is
inevitably a downside. As the world’s computers become increasingly
linked into a global network, the risk that one person may one lives
also increases proportionately. And as Lee Sawyer queried in the novel,
“What if he’s a bad guy?”
Washington, D.C.
January 1997