comments on emoney story

[Steven Levy]

There's been a few comments about my Emoney story in the December WIRED and
I thought I'd clarify a couple of things.

FROM JOHN YOUNG:

>And, yes, for the Chaum-uncharmed, Mr. Chaum was rude to Mr.
>Levy.  Whether Mr. L. is rude in kind to Mr. C. is an exercise
>left to the reader.

For the record, I didn't consider Chaum rude to me.  Actually our
interviews (which were considerably lengthy) were quite cordial and not at
all contentious. In fact, I think gracious would be be a better way to
describe Chaum's behavior towards me.  Perhaps John is thinking that
David's reticence to publicly talk about some personal stuff is akin to
rudeness.  If that's what came out in the story, it was certainly
unintentional.

And I certainly hope I was not rude to Chaum in the article. I tried to
portray him fairly, give him his say, and explain his work so that people
would agree with me that it is extremely important.

BTW, Chaum has indicated that he had no problem with the article.

FROM KAWIKA DAGUIO:

>
><As you can guess there are two opposing camps on [anonymity]:
>
><U.S. Government Agencies AAA .. ZZZ       DigiCash Corporation
><The American Bankers Association  - vs - assorted cypherpunks
><Microsoft Corporation                 assorted privacy advocates
><The Borg                               at least one Libertarian
>
>                  *******************************
>Whoa! Much of content of the discussions I had with Mr. Levy
>concerned the importance of protecting privacy and security for
>everyone.  None of those comments made the cut.  Yes, I have
>concerns about fully anonymous digital cash, but while I am not a
>full on crypto-anarchist, neither am I a crypto-facist.

I confirm this, and it wasn't my intent to make Kawika a crusader against
anonymity, but someone who, as he says, has concerns about anonymous cash.


I've gotten some good feedback on the article, but unfortunately on the bio
line Wired misspelled my email address (!) so I'm probably missing some of
the best remarks.

_______________________________________________________
                   Steven Levy
    steven at well.com           steven at echonyc.com
       author, Hackers, Artificial Life, Insanely Great
            contributor, Macworld, Wired
   "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
_______________________________________________________