The Privacy/Untraceability Sweet Spot

[Tim May]

On Thursday, August 30, 2001, at 09:50 AM, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:

>     --
> On 27 Aug 2001, at 21:40, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>> "Freedom fighters in communist-controlled regimes."  How much
>> money do they have?  More importantly, how much are they
>> willing and able to spend on anonymity/privacy/black-market
>> technologies?  These guys aren't rolling in dough.
>
> Freedom fighters are generally funded by expatriates resident in
> sympathetic foreign countries.   These expatriates need C3
> equipment to ensure that their money is not being embezzled or
> misused.  By and large they are not using it, and should be.
>
>> "Jews hiding their assets in Swiss bank accounts."  Financial
>> privacy is in fact potentially big business, but let's face it,
>> most of the customers today are not Jews fearing confiscation
>> by anti-semitic governments. That's not in the cards.  Most of
>> the money will be tainted
>
> I find this unlikely.  The powerful confiscate from the
> vulnerable because they want the money, not because the
> vulnerable are sinners deserving to have their money confiscated.
>
> It is always loudly proclaimed that the money is tainted.  When
> the Swiss banks were receiving the money from jews it was
> supposedly tainted because it came from jews.  Later it was
> supposedly tainted because it came from nazis.  Any money is
> tainted when someone else wants it.

And in both of these examples I gave, "Nomen Nescio" took a literal 
reading of the examples. "But Ireland is not a communist regime!" "But 
they are not Jews!"

Examples, like the half dozen I gave, are designed to convey to the 
reader the range of uses, needs, and justifications. The specific stands 
for the general.

Both Nomen and Aimee are remarkably block-headed in seeing the big 
picture.


--Tim May