Dr Jekyll and Mr State

We ordinar-e and good e-ducated digital citizens have to be careful with the way we spend our money ... Living on credit is no longer seen as a blessing in disguise, but rather as the devil in disguise (cf. that "credit crunch" worldwide fuss) ... Like it or not, we have to behave rationally with our money, and we've learned to do so, despite a few bumps along the way ... How about the State?  Now, it looks like the State hasn't learned its lesson as we have ... and keeps behaving irrationally with OUR money (the one that comes from taxes) ... Financial markets are the Worldwide Big Boss ... even the State has to comply in their rules ... Now what are these rules?  The least one can say is that they have nothing to do with rationality ... When you know that those financial markets use trading computers that may cause a company's owner to shift more than 48 times within 3 minutes ... This is casino ... Are the politicians doing anything about this mess?  Hardly ... This is a schyzophrenic situation:  on the one hand we spend our money in the most careful and cautious way ever;  on the other hand, Mr. State, with Our Tax Money, is gambling at the casino (pushed by the financial markets, ruling worldwide) ... There has been this worldwide acclaimed Arab Spring ... looks like a Financial Spring on the Old Continent aka Europe and in the US wouldn't harm ... The sooner, the better (in order to prepare Spring 2012) ...

I'm currently staying in France, but hope to live in Asia soon ... France is a corporatist country - and I'm not only talking about doctors and lawyers here.  India has  a "caste" system in modern times;  we Celtic people have corporations ... whose only interest is to defend their interests against other corporations' ones, or even against the average citizen ... These corporations are to be found about everywhere, for each and every profession in France ... you just can't rule them out or ignore them, as they are the name of the game ... Fair enough, then.  They have a right to exist (I am not a sociologist), but what bothers me most as a French citizen is that they lack transparency.  My role, as a digital citizen, is to force transparency on them.  Take the example of cryptogram in computer science.  Basically, there are two options for data encryption.  First one:  you keep everything secret, with only a small team working on the project, the password issue is not a big one because nobody knows about the data. It's data encryption, with no explanation whatsoever ... Second option is the opposite of the first one:  you explain as much as you can and grant access to the data you want to encrypt to just as many people as possible whose interest might be to detect some kind of failure in the encryption process ... and finally, you encrypt the data with a password.  The first option is not transparent;  the second is.  Now, which option do you think works best?  Well, the second one (this might surprise you).  How's that?  Because in the first option, only a small group of people have thought about the encryption process.  In this case, the encryption leakage might be an accident waiting to happen ... In the second case, data leakage prevention and encryption have been optimized thanks to transparency ...

We French digital citizens should force transparency on this corporatist country.  What do you think?