At 11:50 AM 7/15/00 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,37573,00.html
> Is Encryption Tax-Protective?
> by Declan McCullagh ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
> 3:00 a.m. Jul. 15, 2000 PDT
> WASHINGTON -- It used to be FBI Director Louis Freeh who would rail
> against online anonymity and argue that Americans should not be
> allowed to use encryption software without backdoors.
>
> Now it's the U.S. Treasury Department -- home to the Secret Service,
> the IRS, and the Customs Service -- that's complaining.
>
> "Problems could arise from the increasing sophistication of Internet
> encryption codes that are established for valid reasons of commercial
> secrecy but can also be used to conceal relevant tax details from tax
> administrations," Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said this week.
>
> "In such a world, it will be easier for companies to avoid tax
> collectors by operating worldwide through websites based in
> jurisdictions that are unwilling to share taxpayer information,"
> Summers told a gathering of international tax administrators in
> Washington.
Hey, they're catching on! Should we send these guys a
"Tim May's Signature File" t-shirt and the collected rants of Bob Hettinga?
:-)
The big difference here is that many people think National Security trumps the
First and Fourth Amendments, so it's ok to restrict encryption to stop
Scary Terrorists,
but far fewer people think wiretapping and similar offenses are ok just for
tax collection,
and the IRS's reputation of ripping off widows' houses doesn't sit well
with the public.
The right way to enforce tax collection is to send Nasty Letters,
followed by visits from dull humorless accountants to see your books,
followed by brighter but more humorless accountants to see your other set
of books.
Corporations and other licensed businesses are required to produce business
records;
there have been some interesting cases on whether those records need to be
readable by tax authorities. There was a case in the US-Occupied
Philippines on
something that I think was called the Chinese Business Records Act which got
tossed by a US Federal court - it had banned keeping business records in
Chinese
because US colonial bureaucrats couldn't read them.
(And one of the right-wing Constitutionist types tells of presenting his
business records
to a magistrate or tax bureaucrat in Idaho, which his accountant had
written in Hebrew.
The accountant was back in New York City, and the local government were all
goyim,
and it was pretty obvious that if they got around this problem he'd pull
something else
on them, so they dropped the issue. But that's just local/state stuff,
not useful precedent.)
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
