RAH writes:

I don't think you understand how bearer credentials would work.

With blinded bearer credentials, prosecutors wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on, since the authenticator is only validating the *existence*, or not, of a blinded age credential. With bearer credentials, authenticated in exchange, of course, for cash :-), the authenticator of those credentials has no idea *who* is asking for that proof of age.

You're saying that the customer comes to the porn merchant with a blinded credential. The merchant goes to the authenticator with the credential, and pays for it to be authenticated. The blinding is there to protect the customer, as the credential is unlinkable to his credit card which he used to prove his age.

There's no direct sales contact with any particular content vendor. Validation of age would probably be done in somekind of graded auction market, anyway.

Actually there is direct sales contact with the content vendor. The notion that he is going to come to the authenticator and pay CASH for EVERY customer contact is absurd. It's completely uneconomical until we have a worldwide ecash infrastructure. If that's what you had in mind, shut up for ten years and speak up when you have something relevant to say. What will really happen is that the porn merchant will have an account with the authenticator, and he'll pay every month or so based on how many authentications have been done. That's how business works. This means that there IS sales contact, and the authenticator DOES KNOW who his merchants are. It is exactly the same business relationship as exists today, except that the customers have the benefit of blinding to protect their identities.

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Thomas Reedy, 37, and his wife, Janice Reedy, 32, of Fort Worth, are accused in an 87-count indictment of providing access to several child-porn Internet sites by verifying subscribers' credit cards and assigning them passwords.

The Reedys maintain that they did not know that some of the pornographic sites they provided access to contained illegal child pornography.

In fact if anything this kind of prosecution is an argument *against* getting into the ecash/ecredential business, especially if it is focused on porn as some have proposed. All you need is for someone to use it to sell or authorize access to kiddie porn, and you're going to jail.

It would be interesting to see this tested in court. There is sizeable legal precedent for the issuers of bearer cash, say a nation-state, not being held liable for purchases using that cash. The same could be said for issuers of bearer credentials.

Somehow I doubt that the Reedys are going to get away with saying that governments aren't held liable for misdeeds commited with their currency, so they shouldn't be blamed when someone sells bad stuff using the Reedy's own services. Look at what they're accused of! Providing access to kiddie porn by verifying credit cards and assigning passwords. That's exactly what your bearer cert business will do except instead of passwords they'll issue blinded tokens. This is especially true when the de facto market for such a business is only the worst porn, the porn that the customers really don't want anyone to be able to find out they were involved with. This kind of information comes out in court. You can't hide it. Obvious. ________________________________________________________________________ Total Internet Privacy -- get your Freedom Nym at http://www.freedom.net --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'