There's been a few comments about my Emoney story in the December WIRED and I thought I'd clarify a couple of things. FROM JOHN YOUNG:
And, yes, for the Chaum-uncharmed, Mr. Chaum was rude to Mr. Levy. Whether Mr. L. is rude in kind to Mr. C. is an exercise left to the reader.
For the record, I didn't consider Chaum rude to me. Actually our interviews (which were considerably lengthy) were quite cordial and not at all contentious. In fact, I think gracious would be be a better way to describe Chaum's behavior towards me. Perhaps John is thinking that David's reticence to publicly talk about some personal stuff is akin to rudeness. If that's what came out in the story, it was certainly unintentional. And I certainly hope I was not rude to Chaum in the article. I tried to portray him fairly, give him his say, and explain his work so that people would agree with me that it is extremely important. BTW, Chaum has indicated that he had no problem with the article. FROM KAWIKA DAGUIO:
<As you can guess there are two opposing camps on [anonymity]:
<U.S. Government Agencies AAA .. ZZZ DigiCash Corporation <The American Bankers Association - vs - assorted cypherpunks <Microsoft Corporation assorted privacy advocates <The Borg at least one Libertarian
******************************* Whoa! Much of content of the discussions I had with Mr. Levy concerned the importance of protecting privacy and security for everyone. None of those comments made the cut. Yes, I have concerns about fully anonymous digital cash, but while I am not a full on crypto-anarchist, neither am I a crypto-facist.
I confirm this, and it wasn't my intent to make Kawika a crusader against anonymity, but someone who, as he says, has concerns about anonymous cash. I've gotten some good feedback on the article, but unfortunately on the bio line Wired misspelled my email address (!) so I'm probably missing some of the best remarks. _______________________________________________________ Steven Levy steven@well.com steven@echonyc.com author, Hackers, Artificial Life, Insanely Great contributor, Macworld, Wired "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." _______________________________________________________