At 8:53 AM 7/19/94 -0400, Duncan Frissell wrote:

Inefficient government monopolies create marvelous profit opportunities for markets to arbitrage the gap between cost and price. In a highly efficient networked world, it will be very difficult for governments to compete.

Yeah. What he said. Arachno-Capitalism, anyone? You have to be careful to use the analytic methods of the present (modern financial concepts, for instance), to make informed guesses about the future. If you don't, and your analysis is clouded with a belief in the efficacy of command economies, you start to see totalarians behind every bush. I think Eric put his finger on it before when he said something about not demonizing the NSA. They were just wrong, and they were going to lose this fight because the technology was stacked against them. "Reality is not optional", to quote Thomas Sowell. While I've been watching this discussion about manditory identity, I keep remembering a couple of things I read a while ago. The first was Gerard K. O'Neill's book "2081". Gerry was the Princeton physicist whose undergraduate physics class started the space colonization craze of the late 70's. In "2081", O'Neill had posited a world where, among other things, everyone had micro-transponders. The ultimate nightmare of free people everywhere. Yet it had it's advantages. You could pick up something and walk out of a store, and since the store's receivers knew who you were and what you took, the item would be deducted from your bank account. Phone calls would be routed to follow you wherever you went. If a crime is committed, you have an alaibi. I'm pretty sure most of you have heard about Xerox PARC's work in this regard. There was an article in Scientific American about it a couple of years ago. I even saw that Olivetti has begun manufacturing the smart badges (transponders) upon which the technology hinges. I expect that strong cryptology is the way to make this technology work so that a person's freedom and privacy is actually enhanced. The other thing I remember reading was an old Esther Dyson (Freeman Dyson's daughter...synchronicity!) quote about the necessity for some kind of law which made personal information the property of the person whose information it was. Again, I expect strong crypto and market mechanisms will evolve together to enforce that legal claim at some point. Cheers Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923