At 7:45 AM -0800 2/14/00, Duncan Frissell wrote:
>At 08:55 PM 2/12/00 -0500, Petro wrote:
> Or will bother to look in the future.
>
>> What is considered legal/moral/rational today *might* change in
>> the future. Do you really want to take that chance?
>>
>> It's a lot easier to remove your eye-glasses to hide your
>> intellectualism than to hide a decade or twos computerized records of
>> your checking seditious literature out of the library, or buying it from
>> Amazon.com.
>
>On the other hand, you can just blow people off these days if they don't
>like your activities. Since one has millions of possible employers and
>millions of possible residence locations and since attitudes are so
>diverse, you will be able to find people to live with no matter how bizarre
>your practices. Even smokers can find work these days. Anarchists have no
>problems. For some companies, anarchism's a positive.
And since there seem to be some newcomers who are here bashing "megacorps"
and calling for "privacy laws," let's revisit some well-known points:
* the desire for a profit almost always wins out over the desire to collect
customer information: if a business has a choice between collecting some
customer info or completing a sale, it will take the sale every time.
(Unless other factors, such as government requirements, intervene...)
* cash settlement is nearly always acceptable, except when Drug and Tax
Warriors decree otherwise.
* when the bus companies had blacks sitting in the back of the bus in the
south, it was largely local _law_ that caused them to spend this additional
money to enforce such rules. (Same as when IBM and Coke and other
corporations wanted no part of apartheid in South Africa--it was the RSA
government which demanded they practice apartheid.)
* "megacorps" are just businesses which have had a lot of customers. Cisco
is a megacorp because a zillion people like their routers.
* "true names" mean very little to businesses, but a lot to government.
Most of the laws about true names, identity, etc., come from ham-handed
attempts by government to regulate or control. (The perfect example being
airline travel--requirements that some official ID be presented have
nothing to do with whether bombs are on board planes, for many obvious
reasons.)
The Cypherpunks list has obviously evolved over time. We don't discuss
"basics" very often (part of the neo-Cypherpunk mantra of "Cypherpunks
don't debate philosophy, Cypherpunks listen to spokesdroids from crypto
companies describe their latest products").
However, it would be good if newcomers to the list read some of the basics,
thought about the implications of liberty and crypto anarchy, and
reconsidered some of their calls for government action to "protect privacy."
--Tim May
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
