Bear wrote, quoting me:
Hiding or secrecy as a total strategy has historically been limited by the Rule Of Secrets/Least Safe Principle, and the equally-important "well, doesn't this look suspicious!" -- a rule of natural law and human disposition. Crypto is not a person, object and asset invisibility machine.
Ebay may be a good thing, but can you imagine how useless it would be if it had to be kept secret from law-enforcement types? You'd pretty much have to keep it secret from the whole public, and then of course nobody would use it.
I guess that would be flip-side of the Rule Of Secrets, or something.
I've got a nice protocol for running a fully-encrypted mailing list stegoized in images on a web/FTP site, which would be totally invisible to non-participants - but such a list can't be announced publicly so of course nobody could find out about it and join it, without also letting the law know about it and join it.
Interesting. Just as interesting: -NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 448 (1958) -Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1 (1972) -Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends v. Tate, 519 F.2d 1335 (3d Cir. 1975) -Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press v. American Tel. & Tel., (D.C.Cir. 1978) -Gordon v. Warren Consol. Bd. of Educ, 706 F.2d 778 (6th Cir. 1983) -Alliance to End Repression v. Chicago, 627 F.Supp. 1044 (N.D.Ill.1985)
And the list goes on. Every time you try to get something used by more than a dozen people, it cannot be secret.
"Three make keep a secret, if two of them are dead." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1728.
What cannot be secret, you can't keep the law from knowing about. What you can't keep the law from knowing about, you can't keep the law from trying to regulate.
That's probably one of those "universal truths" I've been talking about. *laughter*
And regulation of anything on the internet can happen, because EVERY IP address is in principle traceable. Oh, it may take a week or two -- they may have to slap your ISP with an order to preserve logs and wait for the next time something happens if you're on DHCP, or they may have to get the cooperation of one or more other governments if your login trail runs outside their jurisdiction -- but ultimately, it's traceable.
Hm. For an equally-relevant proposition, See United States v. White, 401 U.S. 745 (1971); United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976). I've seen predictions that by 2005-7, your IP will be biometrically associated. (I have nothing to back to that up, but the source was credible.) ~Aimee