[3177] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
RE: An Essay on Freedom, Anonymity & Financial
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brown, R Ken)
Mon Aug 10 11:49:03 1998
From: "Brown, R Ken" <brownrk1@texaco.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net, "'dianelos@tecapro.com'" <dianelos@tecapro.com>
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 06:17:40 -0500
> Perry Metzger writes:
> >>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?
> [...]
>
> Dianelos Georgoudis replies to Perry:
>I was only talking about a new form of money. I don't quite see
>why this means that everyone's activities will always be tracked.
>Very few of my own activities are financial transactions.
But in order to trace transactions to a human being you need to
be able to define which human beings you have.
The rules and regulation that are needed to make
such a system watertight proabably aren't compatible
with the sort of society a lot of us want to live in
If I try to pay you for something on-line with untraceable
ecash all you need to know is that the payment will be honoured.
If the ecash has to be traceable then I need to be able to prove
I am "really me". A simple system will give you say a 1/100
chance that I'm lying or an impostor.
If the whole world goes for traditional European style
id cards then maybe that change goes down to 1/10000.
(If you're lucky - real criminals find these things easy to
get round - and the levels of intrusion needed to run even
these systems are more than many people would put up with)
If we want 1 in a million levels of provable identity
then we need far, far more intrusive checks to prove that
we are who we say we are.
