From: George A. Gleason <gg@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 92 02:43:35 PST
To: miron@extropia.wimsey.com
Subject: Re: How far is to far?
Message-ID: <199211261042.AA23055@well.sf.ca.us>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Miron Cuperman responds to my concerns about the IRS's claims on barter
systems by saying, "How do you think the IRS is going to trace those banks
and customers behind all the anon mixes?"

I must really disagree here.  If we start sneaking around in the shadows of
legality, we will eventually bring down some nasty attention which will not
help us.  Privacy itself is a mainstream issue.  Dumping all forms of taxes
is not a mainstream issue, in fact the mainstream regards tax resisters as
fringies of the worst order.  This is not to debate the merits of the
substantive issues involved, just to recognise the major PR problem which
exists and say I believe we should stick to the main issue.  I for one don't
want the Feds to have an excuse to lock up the whole net or our little
fragments of it.  

We can minimise taxation and stay completely within the law by operating as
a volunteer not-for-profit network.  And then if the Feds come down on us
for using unregistered crypto keys, we have a new issue that the public
haven't become jaded over, which can be made much of in the media.  

And I would also say that it's not good to give potential adversaries an
excuse for saying we're doing crypto simply in order to hide illegal
activities such as "tax cheating" or whatever; next it will be dope and
kiddie porn and bank robbery via ISDN, eh...?

-gg