At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:
Anguilla seems to be a doing agood job on becoming a country willing on hosting data havens.
Oh yeah? It's been a while since we talked about this (at least on the Cypherpunks list), but a couple of years ago there was much discusson on the CP list about just what items would be allowable in Anguilla. Vince Cate gave his assessment, which I found fairly nebulous, in that it appeared the Ruling Families would allow what they would allow, and not allow what they would not allow---there seemed to be a lot of ad hoc rulings. (Given that copies of "Penthouse" are illegal in Anguilla, if I recall this correctly, and given that gun are illegal, and drugs are illegal, I rather doubt that Anguilla would happily host "The Aryan Nations Bomb Site," or "Pedophile Heaven," or "Gun Smuggler's Digest. " Or the even juicier stuff any "data haven" with any claim to really being a data haven will surely have.)
And there are likely under a hundred oil companies looking for firms to 'recycle' their old oil platforms and drilling rigs wasting away around the world, I'm sure some might just give you one just to be rid of future liability.
Given the willingness of the French to have SDECE sink Greenpeace ships in neutral ports, how long before a couple of kilos of Semtex are applied to the underside of these oil rigs? Given what happened with "pirate broadcast tankers," the future is not bright. When the first "oil rig data haven" is found to have kiddie porn, bomb-making info, and (shudder) material doubting the historicity of the Holocaust, the U.N. will cluck and the public will cheer when it is boarded and seized, or simply sunk. As I said in my last piece on this subject, there is no security in meatspace comparable to what is gotten with mathematics. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."