Mr. Steven Levy writes an admirable article on "E-Money" in December Wired, with emphasis on Chaum's venture, along with various opinions of e-cash systems, the role of cryptography and the salient thoughts of Mr. Eric Hughes. Mr. Levy, I pray, will excuse my quoting two provocative excerpts to induce reading the whole piece: "Corleta Brueck, the project manager for the IRS's Document Processing System, described some of the IRS's plans. These include the so-called 'Golden Eagle' return, in which the government automatically gathers all relevant aspects of a person's finances, sorts them into approriate categories and then tallies the tax due. 'One stop service,' as Brueck puts it. This information would be fed to other government agencies, as well as states and municipalities, which would draw upon it for their own purposes. She vows 'absolutely' that this will happen, assuming that Americans will be grateful to be relieved of the burden of filing any taxes. The government will simply take its due." . . . "[Brueck continues] 'We know everyting about you that we need to know. Your employer tells us everything about you that we need to know. Your activity records on your credit cards tell us everything about you that we need to know. Through interface with Social Security, with the DMV, with your banking institutions, we really have a lot of information . . . We could literally file a return for you. This is the future we'd like to go to.' " * * * "It isn't the future that David Chaum would like to go to, and in hopes of preventing that degree of openess in an individual's affairs, he continues doggedly in his crusade for privacy. . . . He thinks that if an economic system that tracks all transactions comes to cyberspace, the result would be much worse than in the physical world. 'Cyberspace doesn't have all the physical constraints,' he says. 'There are not walls . . . it's a different, scary, weird place, and with identification it's a panopticon nightmare.' " End quotes. And, yes, for the Chaum-uncharmed, Mr. Chaum was rude to Mr. Levy. Whether Mr. L. is rude in kind to Mr. C. is an exercise left to the reader.