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  3. We’re in the midst of a global interconnection that is expected to have cons

We’re in the midst of a global interconnection that is expected to have cons

游客2023-10-12  22
问题     We’re in the midst of a global interconnection that is expected to have consequences at least as profound. What would happen if all the information stored on the world’s computers were accessible via the Internet to anyone?

    Ask Dr. Denise Nagel, executive director of the National Coalition for Patient Rights, about medical privacy. "Small-scale privacy atrocities take place every day. The technology is getting a-head of our ethics," says Nagel.
    【R1】______Then, even more than today, the citizenry instinctively loathed the computer and its injunctions against folding, spindling, and mutilating. The public rebelled, and Congress took up the question of how much the government and private companies should be permitted to know a-bout us.
    【R2】______The first Fair Credit Reporting Act, passed in 1970, overhauled what had once been a secret, unregulated industry with no provisions for due process. The new law gave consumers the right to know what was in their credit files and to demand corrections. Other financial and health privacy acts followed, although to this day no federal law protects the confidentiality of medical records.
    The public and private sectors took two very different approaches. Congress passed legislation requiring that the government tell citizens what records it keeps on them while insisting that the information itself not be released unless required by law. The private sector responded by letting each industry—credit-card companies, banking, insurance, marketing, advertising—create its own guidelines.
    【R3】______In the old days, information stored in government databases was relatively inaccessible. Now, however, with PCs on every desktop linked to office networks and then to the Internet, data that were once carefully hidden may be only a few keystrokes away.
    Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, says: " We think that privacy is about information, but it’s not—it’s about relationships. " There was no privacy in the traditional village or small town: everyone knew everyone else’s secrets. And that was comfortable. "What’s gone out of whack is we don’t know who knows about us anymore. Privacy has become asymmetrical. "
    【R4】______And not surprisingly, he and others points out that what technology has taken, technology can restore. The idea is to allow computer users to decide how much information they want to reveal while limiting their exposure to intrusive marketing techniques. Website entrepreneurs learn about their customers’ tastes without intruding on their privacy.
    【R5】______ Many office electronic-mail systems warn users that the employer reserves the right to monitor their e-mail. "Technology has outpaced law," says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. Rotenberg advocates protecting the privacy of e-mail by encrypting it with secret codes so powerful that even the National Security Agency’s supercomputers would have a hard time cracking it. Such codes are legal within the United States but cannot be used abroad——where terrorists might use them to protect their secrets—without violating U. S. export laws.
    Rotenberg thinks we need a new government agency——a privacy agency——to sort out the issues. "We need new legal protections," he says, "to enforce the privacy act, and to act on behalf of privacy interests. " Wired’s Kelly disagrees. "A federal privacy agency would be disastrous! The answer to the whole privacy question is more knowledge," he says. "More knowledge about who’s watching you. More knowledge about the information that flows between us. "
Questions 61 to 65
Choose from the sentences A - G the one which best fits each gap of 61 -65. There are two extra sentences which you do not need to use.
A. But worse things may already be happening.
B. Our culture is undergoing a kind of mass identity crisis, trying to hang on to a sense of privacy and intimacy in a global village of tens of millions.
C. The result was a flurry of new legislation that clarified and defined consumer and citizen rights.
D. That approach worked—to a point, when mainframes started giving way to desktop computers.
E. Many online consumers, however, are skittish about leaving any footprints in cyberspace.
F. It all started in the 1950s, when the US government began entering records on big mainframe computers, using nine-digit identification numbers as data points.
G. The trick, says Kelly, is too restore that balance. [br] 【R2】
选项
答案 C
解析 前文介绍了公民对于电脑的各种憎恨，面对公众的抗议，议会开始讨论政府和私人公司应对公民有多大程度的了解。该空所在段则介绍了关于保护隐私的法案，C项提到“The result”和“new legislation”，起了承上启下的作用。
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