Anguilla - A DataHaven?
Tim:
Rather, there is an "archetype," if you will, of what a "remailer" is, what a "data haven" is, what a "tax shelter" is, etc. While we cannot reasonably expect a remailer to exactly match the archetype, we can point out obvious deficiencies.
1) Anguilla has secrecy laws. Professional relationships are confidential. There are strong secrecy laws. I have not given out taxbomber's name, nor will I as I could face legal action if I did. 2) Anguilla has no sales or income taxes. A business does not need to report anything about income, sales, etc, to the government (or anyone else). If a guy wants to sell his data and keep 100% of the profits instead of 50% or 60%, then Anguilla would be a haven for him. 3) We don't have the same laws as other countries, so there are things that can be done here. For example, we can export encryption software. Also, we will have bingo.com in Anguilla. There are deficiencies from a cypherpunk or Libertarian point of view. And these are interesting. And exactly what I want to do is changing. As I said, Anguilla is not the datahaven of cypherpunks wet dreams. I am sure there are no datahavens that match the cypherpunk concept of an ideal datahaven, yet. But I think the term DataHaven applies as well to Anguilla as any other place I know of. Tim, we would all be very happy if you were to locate a country that could be the site of the ideal datahaven, and finance a couple cypherpunks to setup there. It would be a big help to our cause. Could you do this? In the mean time, people may have to exist in cyberspace (like www.taxbomber.com) without having a totally secure physical location. This is not the end of the world, or really even that painful. If done right you could be down for only an hour - just long enough for nameservers to change. Taxbomber is now setup to do it very fast next time, if the need ever comes. Tim, I think you have even advocated this approach, not stressing the physical location, just the cyberspace location. No? -- Vince ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vincent Cate vince@offshore.com.ai http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince/ Offshore Information Services http://www.offshore.com.ai/
On Wed, 14 Aug 1996, Vincent Cate wrote:
Tim:
Rather, there is an "archetype," if you will, of what a "remailer" is, what a "data haven" is, what a "tax shelter" is, etc. While we cannot reasonably expect a remailer to exactly match the archetype, we can point out obvious deficiencies.
1) Anguilla has secrecy laws. Professional relationships are confidential. There are strong secrecy laws. I have not given out taxbomber's name, nor will I as I could face legal action if I did.
2) Anguilla has no sales or income taxes. A business does not need to report anything about income, sales, etc, to the government (or anyone else). If a guy wants to sell his data and keep 100% of the profits instead of 50% or 60%, then Anguilla would be a haven for him.
3) We don't have the same laws as other countries, so there are things that can be done here. For example, we can export encryption software. Also, we will have bingo.com in Anguilla.
There are deficiencies from a cypherpunk or Libertarian point of view. And these are interesting. And exactly what I want to do is changing. As I said, Anguilla is not the datahaven of cypherpunks wet dreams. I am sure there are no datahavens that match the cypherpunk concept of an ideal datahaven, yet.
But I think the term DataHaven applies as well to Anguilla as any other place I know of.
Tim, we would all be very happy if you were to locate a country that could be the site of the ideal datahaven, and finance a couple cypherpunks to setup there. It would be a big help to our cause. Could you do this?
In the way that you suggest, I would argue it is not possible. You cannot ever have a "DataHaven" in a single jurisdiction. As Mr. Cate notes, there is no jurisdiction that will fit the bill, nor do I ever expect that one will be created.
In the mean time, people may have to exist in cyberspace (like www.taxbomber.com) without having a totally secure physical location.
The trick is to get the ISP to exist in cyberspace, or ever will it be subject to the whim of the local authority. This is a key and very important distinction.
This is not the end of the world, or really even that painful. If done right you could be down for only an hour - just long enough for nameservers to change. Taxbomber is now setup to do it very fast next time, if the need ever comes. Tim, I think you have even advocated this approach, not stressing the physical location, just the cyberspace location. No?
I have advocated the approach, but as applied to service providers, not users of service providers.
-- Vince
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vincent Cate vince@offshore.com.ai http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince/ Offshore Information Services http://www.offshore.com.ai/
-- I hate lightning - finger for public key - Vote Monarchist unicorn@schloss.li
Black Unicorn:
The trick is to get the ISP to exist in cyberspace, or ever will it be subject to the whim of the local authority.
This is a key and very important distinction.
I agree. I think this would be a good focus for cypherpunks to think about for awhile. So let me try to start something. A first step is just having a domain name (foo.com) that you can move to different virtual hosts. This is still vulnerable at either the Internic or at your nameservers. Could also be a subdomain of some provider (say foo.c2.org), but then c2.org gets the pressure. So far I don't know of reporters going after the Internic for allowing a name (like foo.com). So this could be safe for awhile. But it is not totally secure. A better method would be to make our own cypherpunk top level domain (I think Sameer talked about this some time back). With this people would either have to setup their nameserver to use one of the cypherpunk nameservers or get the IP address from some other method (a web page, ftpable file, newsgroup, searching AltaVista, or a web page with a cgi script to do the lookup on a machine). But with this there would be no easy way to cut off a name, and the ISP could always relocate if their physical location were cut off (i.e. the IP address had to change). Then it is just an issue of coordinating this top level domain. Say a public key for each new subdomain and updates are done by sending a pgp signed message to each of the servers. With this type of design you could have hundreds or thousands of servers that each were updated independently. To shut it down would take shutting down a lot of nameservers. What do people think? -- Vince ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vincent Cate vince@offshore.com.ai http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince/ Offshore Information Services http://www.offshore.com.ai/
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