On Wed, 6 Sep 1995, Timothy C. May wrote:
At 10:15 PM 9/6/95, Rob Lowry wrote:
Beyond having the willies.. This is more than just scary, it feels like rape when you think about it for awhile. Everything you buy, on credit, is recorded and sold to someone who wants to know your secrets. Everytime you make a banking transaction, someone is watching and compiling the data.
If someone doesn't want their postings going into my 220 megabyte file of postings, they shouldn't send them to me. Or they should adopt a digital pseudonym, unlinkable to their True Name or any other nyms they may have.
Things are much simpler and less stressful when you don't look to the law to fix things.
Nor was I suggesting a legal solution (I know your comment was triggered by Rob's request for legal recourse) but instead suggesting that things are farther along than some people realize. Someone suggested a rational, non-hysterical approach to converting people. Perhaps. I certainly wrote a nice letter to the editor of a magazine which published a piece about electronic checking, and made sure to mention that e-cash would be preferable to some. On the other hand, The Gub'mint is certainly conducting a campaign overt and covert to throttle unlimited and uncontrolled use of cryptography. That combined with how politicized things are these days, it can be difficult to conduct a rational debate or in fact find anyone who wants to talk. Personally, I'm of the opinion that we need to a pre-emptive crypto strike. But just as the 'Privacy Card' has been debated here endlessly, so too reaching critical market mass w/a 'bump in the cord' product. David Neal <dneal@usis.com> - GNU Planet Aerospace 1-800-PLN-8-GNU Unix, Sybase and Networking consultant. "...you have a personal responsibility to be pro-active in the defense of your own civil liberties." - S. McCandlish