At 10:16 AM -0800 on 11/29/00, obvious@beta.freedom.net wrote:
Are you kidding? These people just did the credit card verifications. They'd be in just as much trouble if they provided bearer credential services.
I don't think you understand how bearer credentials would work. With blinded bearer credentials, prosecutors wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on, since the authenticator is only validating the *existence*, or not, of a blinded age credential. With bearer credentials, authenticated in exchange, of course, for cash :-), the authenticator of those credentials has no idea *who* is asking for that proof of age. There's no direct sales contact with any particular content vendor. Validation of age would probably be done in somekind of graded auction market, anyway.
Thomas Reedy, 37, and his wife, Janice Reedy, 32, of Fort Worth, are accused in an 87-count indictment of providing access to several child-porn Internet sites by verifying subscribers' credit cards and assigning them passwords.
The Reedys maintain that they did not know that some of the pornographic sites they provided access to contained illegal child pornography.
In fact if anything this kind of prosecution is an argument *against* getting into the ecash/ecredential business, especially if it is focused on porn as some have proposed. All you need is for someone to use it to sell or authorize access to kiddie porn, and you're going to jail.
It would be interesting to see this tested in court. There is sizeable legal precedent for the issuers of bearer cash, say a nation-state, not being held liable for purchases using that cash. The same could be said for issuers of bearer credentials. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'