L. Todd Masco:
Perhaps one could generate a privacy crisis by collecting that information and conducting a mass mailing to every person in the database: "we have this information on you. So could anybody with $125. Call your congress critter and complain."
I love the first part of this idea, and hate the second part. As other posters have noted, putting the information that we are unconsciously giving away to strangers, back in front of our faces, is worth any million screeds about how our privacy is being eroded. The fact is, we can't see that our privacy is being eroded. It happens silently and invisibly. That feedback loop needs to be completed to our guts, for there to be enough awareness to motivate most people. But just what are we supposed to tell our Congressmen to do? We have way too much "write your Congressman to solve all our problems" bullshit in the privacy advocacy area. It's almost all hallucination. I defy you to suggest anything that has a snowball's chance in hell of passing that will _in fact_ have a major impact on improving our privacy instead of just satisfying the needs of special interests who want to keep their monopoly on consumer information and keep consumers effectively ignorant of what they are collecting. The most likely outcome of the above tactic are weak laws saying that DMVs can only sell their data to a few select federal agencies and credit reporting companies. What a blow for privacy. What we need is privacy as a _business_ movement. We need to offer services that are alternatives to to the current dossier system. People have to take action on their own, not go whining to their purported leaders and comforting themselves that that they have done something to solve the problem. Political action does have a niche in the activist ecology, but it is a much smaller niche than is reflected by the dominance of politics over more important consideraions in the privacy movemement. The proper niche of political action is as completementary supplement to personal action and business activity. Political action that purports to be the main solution to the problem is, in all likelihood, part of the problem. Political activism in favor of legal cryptography is a supplement, a support for our personal decisions to use cryptography to empower people to improve their own privacy. It is not a replacment for deploying and using cryptography, it is only a support activity. Most of the decisions will be made in the marketplace, in this case the marketplace of aliased and out of state driver's licenses, with with politcs being only one of a wide variety of considerations. Jim Hart hart@chaos.bsu.edu