From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 94 05:19:35 PDT
To: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)
Subject: Re: e$: Cypherpunks Sell Concepts
In-Reply-To: <199408070228.WAA26202@zork.tiac.net>
Message-ID: <9408071220.AA19695@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Robert Hettinga says:
> Is it possible to accurately estimate the cash transaction load of an
> economy?  I bet that if we could, you'd see that the data from each
> transaction would cause the problem news servers have by several orders of
> magnitude.  The information would get dumped pretty frequently.  This is
> probably the same problem the NSA has now picking out signals to listen in
> on, but running down an audit trail is different, it's a historical
> process.  Since you don't know whose transactions you need, you need to
> keep them all. True, this doesn't keep TLAs from trying trying to drink
> from a firehose, or more to the point, to free-dive to the bottom of the
> Marianas Trench (if they could keep all of the data), or high-dive into a
> wading pool (if they couldn't). Hmmm...

It is perfectly feasable to track all financial transactions in the
U.S., down to the "quarter for a phone call" level, without
eliminating all capacity to use the data or placing more than, say,
another several percent burden on the cost of all transactions. I know
how to architect such a system, and I'm sure that I'm not the only
one. It would be a big job, but not an impossible one, especially not
with modern computer systems. A several percent burden on the economy
would be devistating, but from the point of view of the bureaucrats it
probably isn't such a bad thing. I feel that it is inevitable that the
folks in Washington will eventually come to the conclusion that such
systems are needed -- the boys at FINCEN will start bawling for them,
and the drug warriors will want them, and the rest of us are all just
a bunch of folks who are upset that we couldn't go to woodstock
because we had to do our trig homework...

Perry