I had a dream last night that I was a prisoner in a minimum security prison. One of my fellow inmates looked suspicously like Steve McQueen. One morning I saw Steve McQueen walking towards the far end of the excercise yard. He didn’t come back. I followed a while later and found a hole in the fence. Several of us went through, but by that time we could already hear the dogs howling behind us. I had just enough time get to a patio and have a beer and a chat before I was tracked down. I lost a hand in the confrontation, but was brought back in. Only Steve got away.

I am sure there is no connection between my dream and this well thought out and reasonably balanced article by Steven Levy of Newsweek:A Net of Control. This is the first time I’ve seen a non-geeky journalist reporting on the coming of Microsoft/Intel’s “trusted computing” regime. It’s also the best explanation of it I’ve seen. I’m more concerned than ever, although he does point out some of the real advantages that would come alongside the drawbacks.

How could the freedom genie be shoved back into the bottle? Basically, it?s part of a huge effort to transform the Net from an arena where anyone can anonymously participate to a sign-in affair where tamperproof ?digital certificates? identify who you are. The advantages of such a system are clear: it would eliminate identity theft and enable small, secure electronic ?microtransactions,? long a dream of Internet commerce pioneers. (Another bonus: arrivederci, unwelcome spam.) A concurrent step would be the adoption of ?trusted computing,? a system by which not only people but computer programs would be stamped with identifying marks. Those would link with certificates that determine whether programs are uncorrupted and cleared to run on your computer.

The best-known implementation of this scheme is the work in progress at Microsoft known as Next Generation Secure Computing Base (formerly called Palladium). It will be part of Longhorn, the next big Windows version, out in 2006. Intel and AMD are onboard to create special secure chips that would make all computers sold after that point secure. No more viruses! And the addition of ?digital rights management? to movies, music and even documents created by individuals (such protections are already built into the recently released version of Microsoft Office) would use the secure system to make sure that no one can access or, potentially, even post anything without permission.

Where’s Steve McQueen when you need him?