Duncan Frissell wrote about software agents out of government control:
I know it will be possible to force these agents to be linked to humans but that would only be at birth. No control is possible over who has the codes to control the software agents of the future.
Unless we completely lose the war for privacy and will have to show our retinas to a scanner to be able to access any net (with an identification attached to all our communications) you are right, I hope. But flesh agents need privacy too. Imagine Singapore collecting DNA imprints of all their citizens (and all visitors at custom control) then sweeping the streets for saliva every morning at 3am and whipping the flesh of all offenders. In my country we are all issued a unique software agent at birth i the format: YYMMDDxxxy where y is a check for authenticity (to make it harder faking a number I guess) in the following way: YYMMDDxxx are alternately multiplied by 2 or 1 such as 2xY,1xY,2xX,... A result of 10 or more is treated like 1+0 to get a number not higher than 9. Then all the results are added and the sum is subtracted from the nearest higher power of 10 to get y (if the sum is an even power of 10 you get 10 transforming to 1+0=0). xxx are chosen so as to identify a male by y=even and a female by y=odd (y=0 identifies...eh, I forgot, not a hermaphrodite though). Hope this helps if you would ever like to use a 'personal' agent in this jurisdiction! Take care not to use one which is already occupied since that could cause great trouble for the original holder (or make him rich?). Plenty of clercs have access to some database where this can be checked though, no problem, but I don't know how long it would take for a particular database to find out that your agent has no former history. Disregarding the trivial task of faking another true identity the system is not easy to beat on this level. So I look forward to making my transactions in digicash over a phantom node on the net, through a free anonymous agent. For reasons of privacy. //mb