Responding to msgs by: Jim Hart: Thus, the upshot of these so-called "privacy" regulations is to destroy our last shreds of privacy against government, and calm us into blindly getting even more of the details of our personal lives into the mainframes of the major government agencies and credit reporting agenices........ Timothy C. May: . . . . Suffice it to say that our credential-happy society is getting very little real benefit for demanding credentials at every turn and is instead providing precise dossier material for those who keep dossiers. ................................................................. ..... The regulations regarding privacy and the demands for them by the 'credential-happy' society leaves me with the impression that this phenomena has the role of acting as substitute for something, as any time that the voting public makes demands from the big G it indicates a need to compensate for a sense of inadequacy relative to some area of their social co-existence. In this case it is as though the demand for personal information & credentials replaces sensitivity to, & understanding of, human nature. As services become more automated the opportunity for human contact is diminished, while the need to certify the verity of remote data becomes more critical. When the information has been centralized, it has the effect of displacing personal responsibility away from the individual up to the State, as the State becomes the official keeper of the data. And how else could the governors be expected to fulfill their obligation of keeping the peace and general welfare, if they cannot gather & keep information on all their remote & moving targets? When the centralized databank gatherers have the required info, then the general populace expects to feel safe that everyone can be dealt with - by their Official Caretakers, sinced it cannot be done by themselves. ("I don't know you, but I can still keep track of you and therefore keep you under control, if you get out of hand.") These things self-perpetuate: the more that one group gives it up, the more that the other takes it up & away; the more inadequate that those who abdicate from responsibility feel, the more they look to their governors to substitute their overriding supervisory powers. The less that the governed exercise their abilities to know themselves and each other, the less capable they become in the art of doing so, and the more convinced they become of the necessity for mandated forfeiture of personal data. When you don't live by reason, you must live by recourse to coercion. Blanc