Ryan Lackey:

...

A "datahaven country" would have to be immune to such tactics -- either having its own strong military (China as datahaven) to defend its national interests, political connections (Israel?), or enough trade with the US that shutting off data commo would be impossible for economic reasons (Singapore?).

China _is_ currently a data haven, and the US trade talks have been focussed on getting them to stop it. It's not using the Internet, just CDROMs and snailmail, but it's a huge market... At 03:16 PM 1/13/98 +0000, Ross Anderson wrote:

A virtual datahaven could be constructed eaily provided you knew how to index controversial matter. Publish the rude things about the Prophet Mohammed on a server in Israel, the anti-Serb rants in Croatia, the kiddyporn in Sweden, the violence in America, the Nazi hate speech in Syria and the anti-scientology stuff in Germany.

But to do that you've got to know what's on your server, and data havens strongly depend on deniability and scalability, so you don't sell those bits on the chips implanted in your head. You could manage your storage in a way that lets users specify where they _don't_ want a given opaque file to be, so they can keep the anti-Foobarian speech out of Foobar, but if you let them specify where they do want it, it's too easy to plant stuff. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639