Re: legally required forgetting
Regarding the question of whether debt must be merely 'forgiven' or actually 'forgotten', see http://www.epic.org/privacy/fcra for information on the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970: "The FCRA limits the length of time some information can appear in a consumer report. For instance, bankruptcies must be removed from the report after 10 years. Civil suits, civil judgments, paid tax liens, accounts placed for collection, and records of arrest can only appear for 7 years." BlackNet thwarts such limitations on the reporting of consumer credit. Clearly, providing access to this data harms individual privacy. Yet Cypherpunks traditionally have supported this concept. A privacy advocacy group promotes technology which would aid the compilation of individual dossiers and allow access to personally identifying data about past financial transactions. Of course, these were "classical" Cypherpunks, from the days when "men were men and giants walked the earth". They understood that the way to keep data private was not to let it out in the first place. They believed in freedom: freedom of association, freedom of contract. They saw privacy as a means to achieve that freedom, not as an end in itself. Today, the Cypherpunks list is but a shadow of its former glory, with anarcho-capitalism all but forgotten in favor of fashionable nihilism, libertarians replaced by liberals. Perhaps it is not too late to resurrect the ideals of the past, but it will require hard work and open mindedness on the part of all.
At 07:20 PM 4/10/04 -0400, An Metet wrote: ...
BlackNet thwarts such limitations on the reporting of consumer credit. Clearly, providing access to this data harms individual privacy. Yet Cypherpunks traditionally have supported this concept. A privacy advocacy group promotes technology which would aid the compilation of individual dossiers and allow access to personally identifying data about past financial transactions.
All that's needed is for a creditor to publish the names and addresses of his 180-day overdue accounts in some public forum, or to file lawsuits that become public record. Web-accessible archives will do the rest. It's not like the credit reporting rules would necessarily keep a private investigator now from finding out that you declared bankruptcy twenty years ago. ...
Today, the Cypherpunks list is but a shadow of its former glory, with anarcho-capitalism all but forgotten in favor of fashionable nihilism, libertarians replaced by liberals. Perhaps it is not too late to resurrect the ideals of the past, but it will require hard work and open mindedness on the part of all.
Well, some of the ideals, or at least assumptions, haven't survived encounters with the facts too well. Moore's law has continued apace, strong crypto is widely available, but would anyone claim we have more privacy now than in 1990? Nor is this only because of 9/11 (asymmetric warfare apparently *does* work pretty well, though it's hard to see how that's done anything for the cause of freedom in the US); surveilance cameras, OCR, biometric readers and data mining techniques are all getting cheaper. The split seems to be that most people lose privacy, while those who really care a lot gain a little privacy, albeit by standing out as obvious people-with-something-to-hide, activists, or cryptographers. The math behind anonymous payment schemes is well-understood, and processors are fast enough to do signatures and blinding and all the rest pretty painlessly, now. But e-commerce is still all about credit cards over SSL (on a browser that is manifestly *not* a piece of security software!), if that. It's ironic. All the things that seemed like barriers to serious privacy for the masses--Clipper, export controls, the RSA patent, processors barely powerful enough to do serious public key operation before the user lost patience--are either gone or much-diminished. But we still don't have serious privacy for the masses, or even widespread use of crypto in a way that protects communications privacy. It's not like I expected my mom to be making her money trading gold-denominated Burmese opium futures[1] by now. But I at least expected my phone calls and e-mails to her not to be trivially tapable! [1] Classical reference --John Kelsey, kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259
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John Kelsey