"...but the cost to civil liberties of doing so need to be carefully considered" is an understatement.

Palladium appears to be a way for MSFT to hijack (embrace and extend) the TCP/IP standard in a way that locks them into the future of Internet infrastructure.

Could you tell that guy to translate all that Latin? Jeez, talk about pretentious, quoting Descartes in Latin, going on for paragraph after paragraph. What percentage of his readers does he think are going to understand all that? Is his goal communication or intimidation?

Cypherpunks, the page linked to there is Seth's personal journal, which is usually read by his friends and family (though he has no objection to a larger audience). Seth and I and some other EFF staffers will be producing a white paper about the civil liberties interests in Trusted Computing, and you can rest assured that there will be no Latin in that paper. Meantime, you can hardly fault Seth for keeping his personal notebook in a format and style that he's comfortable with.

One thing I will say in the guy's favor is that he is not having the knee-jerk paranoid reaction that so many in the privacy are demonstrating. Ultimately, Palladium and similar security initiatives may be something that should be opposed, but the matter is not black and white. In some circles people are competing to see who can generate the most outrageous scenario in which Palladium becomes a tool of the jack-booted oppressors who are supposedly lurking just offstage. Seth seems to have a more nuanced understanding of the issues, which is almost unheard of these days.

Cory suggested that trusted computing initiatives (and their technical features like sealed storage) occupy in security software's epistemology the same position God and God's perfection occupied in Descartes's epistemology.

you never fail to amaze me.