Scott Brickner wrote: | "Thomas M. Swiss" writes: | > A (possibly stupid) thought: could commercial key escrow help here? | > | > I very much want hospitals to have fast access to my medical data if | >my broken and bleeding body should come through their door, even if I am | >unconscious and my personal physician cannot be reached. On the other hand, | >I don't want anyone to be snooping through them right now. | | Actually, Bell Labs outlines a system which can preserve anonymity | under these circumstances in "The Use of Communications Networks to | Increase Personal Privacy In a Health Insurance Architecture" at | <URL:ftp://ftp.research.att.com/dist/anoncc/privacy.health.ps.Z>. | | It's based on their anonymous credit card protocol, which is really a | sort of identity escrow service managed by a remailer. You might find | it interesting. Maximchuck's anon credit card system depends to a huge degree on fast, highly available remailers, but he makes no provisions for funding them. He suggested at a talk I attended that the Federal Reserve could operate the one remailer that his system would use to protect your privacy. Other than that, its an interesting system which uses no public key crypto for mostly anonymous transactions. Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume