One of the more fascinating aspects of the Internet is the ability of small groups of motivated individuals to create the types of privacy intrusions that used to be the exclusive domain of governments, law enforcement, and credit bureaus. Gone are the early days when the Net was solely government, business, and educational users, and people spouted their opinions on abortion, gun control, child porn, and drug dealing under their real names, and proudly signed them with their corporate logos. On today's Net, saying anything too controversial, that gores the ox of even a small group of zealots, is enough to get you on a list on someone's Web site, and letters written trying to terminate your housing, employment, and social life, by people pretending to be "concerned citizens." Such "Virtual Communities" of axe-grinders can form almost instantaneously, from disparate bored housewives and wannabe vigilantes, and wield collective power that used to be reserved to the powerful and well-organized. Woe be it to him who publicly offends cat-lovers, rabid feminists, smokers, or Scientologists, and lets his IP be traced. Indeed, as the Surveilance State approaches, it is apparent that most of its tentacles are corporate, not government, with citizen units trading privacy for convenience in droves. Enter RepCheck, an amusing Internet startup created back in December, and acting as a clearing house of gossip and other information on private individuals. http://www.repcheck.com/ RepCheck is a simple idea. RepCheck is free. RepCheck is a database of individuals' reputations, which anyone may add to or access. Employers, landlords, prospective business partners, and others, may check the social and business dealings of anyone through the site, and anyone may leave information on anyone else when the site is visited. You must join to access the database, and in doing so, you agree to a Terms of Service which says that you recognize that RepCheck is merely a distributor of information provided by Third Parties, and has no responsibility for any content, and that should you ever have a legal dispute with the site, you agree to resolve it by binding arbitration. You are also invited to give RepCheck the email addresses of several dozen of your closest friends, so they can say nice things about you, and in order to prevent "Identity Theft", RepCheck wants a working credit card number and expiration date, which "they promise never to charge to." (I vaguely remember some porn sites doing this for age verification and then billing tens of millions of dollars in bogus charges a while ago, BTW.) So all you have to do to defend your reputation, is send all your friends to the site, credit card numbers in hand, and recurse this process with your friends' friends, your friends' friends' friends, an arbitrary number of levels deep. Kind of like Make Money Fast with credit card numbers and Reputation Capital, instead of email messages and $5. :) And, like most such pyramid schemes, the lemings pile on in droves. A leading computer magazine reports that within 2 weeks of opening its servers, RepCheck had garnered 25,000 happy users, and presumedly a working credit card number from each. (Which they promise never to bill to, of course.) The US Government is prohibited from warehousing information on how individual citizens exercise their First Amendment rights, except as part of a legitimate criminal investigation. Credit bureaus only disseminate to their subscribers, and don't contain unedited comments on what your neighbors think of you. Police files are generally not public knowlege until you are arrested and convicted of something. There are no such restrictions on how private individuals or companies accumulate or distribute non-credit information, however. No requirements on what can be said. No procedures for correcting erroneous information. No laws that unverifiable information must be removed. No laws that say how your landlord or employer can use such information. Big Brother can certainly use RepCheck too, when looking for individuals having non-mainstream political or sexual views. Even individuals the government would have no legal right to keep files on. Individuals who have broken no laws, and don't hang out with people who do. Is RepCheck the wave of the future, when everyones skeletons in the closet, as recited by their neighbors and business associates, are no more than a mouse click away from everyone else on the planet? Anonymity just became a whole lot more important. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"