computer security analogies in democracy   (link)

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70114-0.html
You can compare these legal concepts to the eight principles for designing secure systems set forth in an article by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder and discussed in Computer Security: Art and Science by Matt Bishop, where I ran across them. These principles are:

* Separation of privilege: The protection mechanism should grant access based on more than one piece of information.
* Least privilege: The protection mechanism should force every process to operate with the minimum privileges needed to perform its task.
* Open design: The protection mechanism should not depend on attackers being ignorant of its design to succeed. It may, however, be based on the attacker's ignorance of specific information such as passwords or cipher keys.
* Fail-safe defaults: The protection mechanism should deny access by default, and grant access only when explicit permission exists.
* Complete mediation: The protection mechanism should check every access to every object.
* Economy of mechanism: The protection mechanism should have a simple and small design.
* Least common mechanism: The protection mechanism should be shared as little as possible among users.
* Psychological acceptability: The protection mechanism should be easy to use (at least as easy as not using it).