Are you guys going to simply represent dollars with your digital cash or will you attempt to create your own currency that may simply be converted to/from dollars?

Accounts will be able to be denominated in USA dollars, the central bank money issued by the USA's own Federal Reserve. Accounts will also be able to be denominated in other major currencies traded on the Foreign Exchange market. Specifics have not been decided. We will not be issuing a new currency. Eric am Reply-To: uri@watson.ibm.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 3561 Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Precedence: bulk Herb Lin says:

In the AOL debate between Barlow and Denning, Barlow asserted that Clipper increases the gov't capability to do traffic analysis. Can someone please describe the technical basis for this claim? (No rhetoric please, just the technical background...)

Traffic analysis is "who contacts who, when, where from, where to, for how long and how often". Today most of the "ordinary public" phone communications are analog/voice. Thus when a phone call comes in, you have the source of the call (i.e. the originating phone number), the destination of the call and the voices (you can analyze them with a reasonable chance to identify the speakers). Today it's quite feasible to obscure the identity of the parties (by using pay phones, and so)... But there are no good ways to secure/encrypt analog voice - thus no matter what measures you use, the contents of the dialog will lay bare. Another communication mode emerges: digital e-mail and digitized voice. This may present much harder tracking problem in both party recognition and location. Imagine anonymous TCP/IP connection server and sort of a chain of "remailers" which bounce TCP packets (or should I have said streams? :-). Plus unbreakable encryption, which deny the eavesdroppers any chance to pry the contents open... It is possible today. Now Clipper comes in. Each digital stream coming out of it will have a tag identifying the source (in case of dialog each party will present thus it's chip ID, which uniquely identifies either the party, or it's location). Note, that when the "voice-remailer" technology picks up (I assume it will, for the privacy seems to be worth of the price) - even an "ordinary person" will be able to enjoy the "total" privacy. While Clipper can't deny such privacy to outlaws (i.e. I can superencipher the output of Clipper chip, or I can use another encryption altogether to avoid both decrypting of the contents and identifying with Clipper ID) - it's obvious, that an "ordinary citizen" simply won't bother, just like he/she doesn't go to a train station to make a phone call to preserve his/her privacy. No matter how "randomly" will the digitized [encrypted] voice data stream bounce around through commercial "voice remailers", it will have identifying tags attached to it, allowing to trace it to it's both end points. It's not today, that Clipper chip is about - it's the future that it endangers. Of course, it all is based on assumptions: 1. Americans want privacy and anonymity (since they also want Caller ID, I'm not sure how correct this is). 2. Anonymous "voice remailers" will come up soon after decent voice encryption becomes available cheaply to the masses, AND WILL BE USED BY GREAT MANY people - otherwise the chain "Joe Schmoe has called Remailer1, it called Remailer2, ..., it called Jim Schmoe" is easily reconstructed (and you don't even have the benefits of random delay before bouncing the pieces off in attempt to confuse an eavesdropper whose piece goes out when and where to). 3. The industry will pick up those tools and expand them to the level of public phone service (and the gov't won't scare or bribe them out from this idea). 4. Traffic analysis is a bad thing and we should deny it to an eavesdropper. [Well, is it true? Where's the line betwen "I don't really care" and "Now my freedom i in danger"?] 5. People are good (no, I'm joking! :-). -- Regards, Uri uri@watson.ibm.com scifi!angmar!uri N2RIU ----------- <Disclamer>