Classical Podium: Do Computers Threaten Liberty? Classic Podium; from a Speech by the Former Cabinet Minister Tony Benn at a Workshop on the `Data Bank Society' Organised by the National Council for Civil Liberties (15 November 1970)

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THREE YEARS ago I attended a conference in Edinburgh on data processing, and there was a Soviet professor who began his speech by saying that in the last 25 years there had been three great scientific developments: one was nuclear energy, which at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocked the world; the second was the discovery of man's capacity to travel in space, which thrilled the world; the third was the discovery and invention of the computer, which went more or less unnoticed, and which was the most important of the three.

I entirely share this view because, when one looks at the future of our society, it is communications technology that provides the central nervous system …