Wherein the ACLU pitches us with the flash-pizza from hell: <http://www.adcritic.com/interactive/view.php?id=5927> I suppose I might actually give a damn about the above scenario if a *business* was able to obtain all that information from other *businesses* on an open market, from information *I* gave to those businesses in the first place, up to, and including, an insurance company -- though I doubt that we'd have "health" insurance, except that for catastrophic events, if such "insurance" weren't deductible from a confiscatory business tax return. I suppose we should be grateful that we don't have "food insurance", like they used to have in, say, the Soviet Union. As I've said many times before, modern financial cryptography was invented by leftist professors to "free" us from evil capitalists. In splendid irony, it was immediately seized upon and evangelized by anarcho-capitalists, to free us from that very model of a modern slave-master: the state. Of course, the market will determine, as always, whether we'll be free or slaves, and if so, to the state, to "capitalists", or whomever. Fortunately, the trend of history, almost since the forcible capture of sedentary proto-agrarian society by "princes" 12,000 years ago, has been one of increasing liberty from such "bandits who don't move". One can hope, and maybe soon, that strong financial cryptography will free all of us, once and for all, from the tyranny of such monopolistic force "markets", and trade *will* finally be free, once and for all. When it does happen, it won't be lawyers who do it though. Especially "public interest" lawyers like the ACLU. It will be the engineers who will use the weapon of the cryptographer's mathematics to save us from the state-constructed tyranny of the lawyer's words. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'