-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- An entity claiming to be Tim May wrote: : : And as with the AOL case of Timothy McVeigh (no, not _that_ one) being : kicked out of the Navy for labelling himself as "gay" and as a "boy hunter" : on one of his AOL profiles, there are already calls for new privacy laws. : : Which misses the point. By illegalizing the keeping or disclosing of : lawfully obtained information, greater harm is done. : : I heard Nadine Strossen of the ACLU arguing today that more laws are needed : to "prevent" these "abuses." In fact, more _technology_ is what's needed. : The technology of Web proxies, remailers, nyms, and such. : This issue was covered in _The Right to Privacy_ by Ellen Alderman and Carolyn Kennedy. The book was misplaced during my recent move, and I didn't get very far through it. I do remember that the current legal standard for invasion of privacy depended upon whether the information was gathered from a public medium. A psychiatric evaluation or Telco records would not be considered a public forum, so could not be used by an employer (unless the evaluation was given by the employer, I guess). A web page, on the other hand is about as public as you can get. I would agree that with the right technologies (proxies, remailers, etc) there would be a de facto protection of privacy, and (insert the not-even-close-to- a-lawyer disclaimer here) that there should be some legal basis that since the effort was made to hide the True Name, the content could not be used, if there were a compromise. Looks like a win-win. It still doesn't deal with morons who *provide* their employers with the ammo to terminate employment. You can make a system foolproof, but you can't make it damnfoolproof. Mark - -- [] Mark Rogaski "That which does not kill me [] wendigo@pobox.com only makes me stranger." [] [] finger wendigo@deathstar.jabberwock.org for PGP key [] anti spambot: postmaster@localhost abuse@localhost uce@ftc.gov -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBNL7xbXzbrFts6CmBAQG6YQgAhywAsGpbDIBY/5h/KSLG+C4BdpYuqIOD Gg1Zy/05gB02+Ap2o7YOpx5pP92iG4uWnYNlUcq6tf+83atd5Y0fvHEnuS5GinQX mdZ8HqZMNR/XaVH+J/BLWcWPjWWGYnI7Zms/3VFvE5tA+0KVX3lKBqpTiCRCOIZi pqInONdqo1derBidHiM0KEcfZJ6zwecaS164NgmKI7/+akDSauK/ja44sKc+4bLI Qfaamrm9pXPKNvc+WOMMNzjNpwzqemfpobDsB3morIcn/eJa/1sE3H2NwnMKvOLY bNhXjfj9P5FNiMqJMHeKMX0vVJGPp3B72y0QEJwpaR5LHst792KF1w== =WPJ3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----