Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

I believed the privacy issue would be quiet until the day it was not. A firestorm could break out with little of the political foundation in place for a more thoughtful approach. The public ambivalence toward privacy reminded me of the nuclear power industry’s experience decades earlier. Throughout the 1970s the nuclear power industry had failed to engage in an effective public discussion about the risks associated with its technological advances, leaving the public and politicians alike unprepared for the meltdown that occurred at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania in 1979. As a result of the calamity, and unlike in other countries, the political fallout from Three Mile Island stopped American nuclear power construction in its tracks. It would take thirty-four years before construction would start on another nuclear power plant in the United States.