Rich Graves <llurch@networking.stanford.edu> writes:
Who would control the offshore data havens? What would they have on me? I am well aware of what TRW et al can do, but at least in theory (cough), they're legally accountable (cough).
I know you disagree, but I'm a big fan of statutes of limitations and the firewalling of unrelated issues. Someone went bankrupt or beat her husband seven years ago (or whatever), I don't want to know about it. I'd rather ten (configurable) guilty men go free than one innocent man get punished. These are artificial boundaries, yes, but they're boundaries within which I'm comfortable living.
I think the reason (some) cypherpunks support things like offshore data havens isn't that they think it's great to reduce the amount of privacy people have. Why would they support crypto and such if that were their motivation? The real reason is because we expect that such databases are going to come into existence regardless of legal efforts. They may be "underground", or for that matter they may be run by governments themselves, whom we are supposed to trust with our secrets. The point is that the best countermeasure is to prevent the collection of the data in the first place. Ecash is better than credit cards for this reason. People should try to structure their lives so that as little information is leaked about them as possible. Relying on laws forbidding people to keep information they have run across isn't likely to be effective. Now maybe the laws, while not perfect, can still at least reduce the amount of this dataveillance. The problem is, this is likely to lead to a false sense of security, where people don't bother to protect their own privacy because big brother is doing it for them. We would rather have these real privacy threats be right out in the open where people can see them. In a way, our position is like those revolutionaries who are convinced the government is evil, while the populace mindlessly goes along with the status quo. Terrorists inflict terror largely to force the government to crack down, raising popular awareness of its oppressive nature, and fostering revolutionary feelings. This is not the cypherpunk goal (as I see it) but still we share the same sense of seeing trouble that most people aren't aware of. Supporting offshore data havens, while harmful to privacy in the short term, might at least awaken people to the problem. If that leads to greater awareness of the need to directly control the release of information about themselves, then in the long run it will be good. Hal