At 09:24 AM 10/17/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
There are several swirling threads about the development of crypto systems (e.g., "binding cryptography," "key recovery," "one-way traceable e-cash") that are designed to allow law enforcement some ability to track illegal transactions, catch some criminals, etc.
One of the other items on my wish-list (short of a more, uh, "permanent" solution to politics) is a system to actually enforce the anonymity of political donations. What I mean is this: As bad as a large political contribution is, what's worse is that the candidate who receives it knows who it is from, and how large it is, etc. Given the recent flap over the Indonesian donations to the DNC, it seems to me that it would actually clean up politics if there were a mechanism to collect donations, blind them and send them to the proper candidate, but hide the actual source of that money. Hide it from the candidates, not necessarily the anyone else. This may sound difficult. After all, it will be argued that a given contributor will want to take credit for a donation and tell those who receive it; one way to help avoid this is the assess huge penalities (say, 10 times the value of the contribution claimed) to the party or candidate who is told of the source of a contribution but does not report the breach of security. The system could be set up to actually encourage people to test it and report fraud, and perhaps be awarded anonymously for providing evidence of misbehavior; and people should be able to (falsely) claim credit for donations, at least to the candidates themselves. Any donation reported to a candidate must be declared by the candidate and is then lost; their motivation for reporting it is that it'll be lost 10x if they don't. The result should be that the candidates should have no idea where the money is actually coming from, only that they are getting it. The contributors should be able to verify (via some sort of encrypted-open-books system) that the money they donate is actually being credited to the candidates, but they should not be able to use this system to prove to the candidate they made the contribution. I really wish those people who are developing that "binding cryptography" proposal would change their minds and decide to work on a proposal such as this, one that might actually help fix the political money problem. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com