Huge Cajones Remailer wrote:
At 9:54 AM 12/13/1996, Rob Carlson wrote:[snip] We are talking about trust models. The reason that the Net is a fundamental threat to the established social order is that it will probably result in a worldwide change in trust models. For one thing, we are now learning just how venal and corrupt the world leadership really is. At the same time, cross-border relationships and trust are flourishing. The rise of anonymous identities raises the question of how we can "trust" somebody we have never met. This immediately leads to the question of why we trust other people we haven't met, such as the President, or scientists, or whomever. It turns out our reasons for "trusting" these people are not as solid as some of us once believed.
I'd like to take a chance on showing my ignorance, but, if I do learn to trust an anonymous source on something-or-other, and then a forger comes along and disrupts that, i.e., I can no longer tell in all cases which is the old source and which is the bogus, that's a problem. I think I could learn to trust any number of anon's, but will the future technology be able to guarantee ID's as well as, say, looking at someone's face whom I know, or talking to them on the phone? [snip]