[3160] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: An Essay on Freedom, Anonymity & Financial
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Sun Aug 9 15:20:21 1998
To: dianelos@tecapro.com
cc: cryptography@c2.net
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 09 Aug 1998 12:52:51 CDT."
<199808091752.MAA01099@tecaprocorp.com>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Sun, 09 Aug 1998 15:15:30 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Dianelos Georgoudis writes:
> Consider: almost all crimes are about money. In an international
> system where money is by definition stamped with the identity of
> its current and previous owners, stealing money, for example,
> would be impossible. Tax evasion would also be impossible. Illegal
> commercial activities such as drug trafficking would also become
> impossible. Extortion and terrorism would become a lot more
> difficult.
Freedom would also become largely impossible.
You are essentially advocating the "surveillance state". If all of
everyone's activities are always tracked, how can anyone do evil?
Unfortunately, there is the problem of "Who shall watch the watchmen?"
The tools you are talking about would be extraordinarily potent in the
hands of a dictatorship -- so much so that they would permit a
dictatorship to go virtually unchallenged. Consider what you could do
if you could monitor EVERY transaction that someone conducts. You
could determine who has been reading "politically incorrect"
materials, traveling to the "wrong sorts" of meetings, making the
"wrong kind" of phone calls, et cetera. Imagine trying to conduct
effective resistance to a dictatorial regime under such circumstances,
or even trying to run in an election against a Richard Nixon style
President?
Many years ago, John Gilmore pointed out a very important and powerful
fact: if you construct the ideal tools for the implementation of a
dictatorship, then it requires only a slight change in attitude on the
part of the government for a dictatorship to, in fact, come into
existence.
This is not a theoretical problem. As you are speaking worldwide, I
will point out Mao, Stalin, and others. As you are apparently Greek, I
will point out that dictatorships existed within your homeland during
the years since the Second World War -- very recent history by my
standards.
Those who placidly think this is a problem confined to "barbarian"
countries (i.e. things other than our utopian United States) should be
reminded that J. Edgar Hoover was not a fictional character, and
neither was Richard Nixon, or Joseph McCarthy. Would George Wallace
have hesitated to use these tools against the civil rights movement?
"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it", only this time,
are we doomed to repeat it with electronic surveillance mechanisms far
beyond the wildest wet dreams of the most power-mad fiends of all time?
> Now, certainly, such a system would be created by governments and
> would be international in its scope. As all powerful tools, this
> one too can be abused. So our task is to see how to diminish the
> potential for abuse. After all, police can be abusive too, but
> nobody is suggesting that governments should stop policing the
> streets.
It is true that it would be "useful" to get rid of crime with the sort
of tools you propose, but on the other hand, it would also be "useful"
for policemen to be able to torture suspects to get information. There
is a reason civilized societies ban such tools. They are not
controllable. Abuse is almost inevitable. They lead to horror that is
unimaginable.
Free societies are a precious and fragile thing. They aren't
eternal. They exist only because we work hard to defend them. The only
way to preserve them is to make sure the government *does not* have
potent tools that would permit it to eliminate freedom. The founding
fathers of the U.S. realized the potentials for abuse when they put
subtle checks into the U.S. Constitution like the fourth, fifth, and
sixth amendments. We move away from openness towards the surveillance
state only at the peril of destroying freedom altogether.
As Orson Welles noted, only in a police state is a policeman's job
easy.
Or, as Ben Franklin noted, those who trade freedom for security soon
have neither.
Do we really want a police state, even if it makes us marginally more safe?
Perry
