Money orders, debit cards, ...

17 Dec 2003

      Some court transcripts from the McVeigh case contain interesting
information about real-life anonymous systems.  See
    http://www.cnn.com/US/9703/okc.trial/transcripts/may/050697.eve.html

Did you know that money orders are not so anonymous as you might think?
On the order itself are digits identifying the post office where the
order was purchased, as well as the date of purchase.  Also, a private
company testified on their money order service, and it comes out that
they keep a computerized record of every money order purchase in a
central database.  Eek.

And read about a real-life instance of traffic analysis of phone calls
based on timing correlations.  This one really happened, folks (though
it was by mistake).  Also, read about how a company offering prepaid
debit cards searched through billions of records to find all phone calls
to or from a certain number, etc.  Read about how they entered a disk
containing information on 100,000--200,000 phone calls (!) into evidence.
(Note: contents of calls are protected by law, but traffic analysis
specifically is allowed, far as I can tell.)

And you value your privacy?  Too bad!

daw＠cs.berkeley.edu

Greg Broiles

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