In article <199408220237.VAA17153@chaos.bsu.edu>, Jim Hart <hart@chaos.bsu.edu> wrote:
L. Todd Masco:
"we have this information on you. So could anybody with $125. Call your congress critter and complain."
I love the first part of this idea, and hate the second part. ... But just what are we supposed to tell our Congressmen to do?
Fair enough. ^Call your congress critter and complain^Support anonymous transactions with digital cash from (company_name). I agree with the anonymous poster who said that such a move should be put off until we have a real solution. So, whatever company wants to kick this off could use this to generate political protection. To put my comment in the right context, I was worried (when thinking about this) about anonymous digital cash being made illegal. The intent would be to kill opposition to anonymous digital cash. Eric mentioned in his talk at the SEA that companies exist that sell mailing lists of people of a particular ethnicity based upon spending patterns: the example he gave was a company marketing to jewish people bought a list of "believed jews" for the purpose of marketing (and Eric mentioned the irony). Another variation of my suggestion would be to get such lists and to mail to people a statement saying "You are registered as an (ethnicity) in mailing lists." Even a 50% hit rate would drive the issue home to people with enormous efficiency. The intent isn't to get the government to Do Something, but to make people en mass aware that privacy is a real issue that affects them. -- L. Todd Masco | "Large prime numbers imply arrest." - Previously meaningless cactus@bb.com | grammatically correct sentence. Now...