At 3:47 pm -0500 2/6/97, Duncan Frissell wrote:

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But Stanley Morris of the United States Treasury, who chaired a FAFT working group which drafted the report, told a news conference that law enforcement agencies would face 'very major new challenges' if new technology moves the world "to a cashless society, beyond banks, cash and borders."

Oh No! First they told us that they were all in favor of a cashless society because they could track all the transactions. It was their Orwellian Dream. Now Nirvana has almost arrived and they're afraid of it. Can't they make up their minds?

I noticed the problem long about 1975 when I noticed that the spread of ATM cards was actually the spread of a bearer instrument and would not satisfy the control needs of the regulatory types.

In a geodesic network, any node which tries to process all the traffic chokes. The network then routes, to paraphrase Gilmore, around it. :-). I remember this pravda chart at CFP a year ago, where FinCEN was "demonstrating" (in a chart with no Y-axis) their "increased supervisory load" due to the exponentiating use of point to point electronic transaction settlement. Be careful whatcha wish for fellas. An old Texas A&M Aggie joke about a poor monkey trying to put the cork back into a pig's butt comes to mind... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity." -- Jerry Pournelle The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/rah/ FC97: Anguilla, anyone? http://www.ai/fc97/