From: blancw@pylon.com
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 94 22:22:12 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Mandated Forfeiture
Message-ID: <199409090522.WAA10477@deepthought.pylon.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Responding to msgs by:

Jim Hart:

Thus, the upshot of these so-called "privacy" regulations is to 
destroy our last shreds of privacy against government, and calm 
us into blindly getting even more of the details of our 
personal lives into the mainframes of the major government 
agencies and credit reporting agenices........

Timothy C. May:

. . . . Suffice it to say  that our credential-happy society is 
getting very little real benefit  for demanding credentials at 
every turn and is instead providing  precise dossier material 
for those who keep dossiers. 
.................................................................
.....

The regulations regarding privacy and the demands for them by 
the 'credential-happy' society leaves me with the impression 
that this phenomena has the role of acting as substitute for 
something, as any time that the voting public makes demands 
from the big G it indicates a need to compensate for a sense of 
inadequacy relative to some area of their social co-existence.

In this case it is as though the demand for personal 
information & credentials replaces  sensitivity to, & 
understanding of, human nature.  As services become more 
automated the opportunity for human contact is diminished, 
while the need to certify the verity of remote data becomes 
more critical.  When the information has been centralized, it 
has the effect of displacing personal responsibility away from 
the individual up to the State, as the State becomes the 
official keeper of the data. 

And how else could the governors be expected to fulfill their 
obligation of keeping the peace and general welfare, if they 
cannot gather & keep information on all their remote & moving 
targets?  When the centralized databank gatherers have the 
required info, then the general populace expects to feel safe 
that everyone can be dealt with  -  by their Official 
Caretakers, sinced it cannot be done by themselves. ("I don't 
know you, but I can still keep track of you and therefore keep 
you under control, if you get out of hand.")

These things self-perpetuate:  the more that one group gives it 
up, the more that the other takes it up & away; the more 
inadequate that those who abdicate from responsibility feel, 
the more they look to their governors to substitute their 
overriding supervisory powers.  The less that the governed 
exercise their abilities to know themselves and each other, the 
less capable they become in the art of doing so, and the more 
convinced they become of the necessity for mandated forfeiture 
of  personal data. 

When you don't live by reason, you must live by recourse to 
coercion.

Blanc