From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 13:55:00 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Children's Privacy Act
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GUL.3.93.960524154831.29645Z-100000@Networking.Stanford.EDU>
Message-ID: <199605250000.RAA11921@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Rich Graves <llurch@networking.stanford.edu> writes:
>Who would control the offshore data havens? What would they have on me? I
>am well aware of what TRW et al can do, but at least in theory (cough),
>they're legally accountable (cough). 

>I know you disagree, but I'm a big fan of statutes of limitations and the
>firewalling of unrelated issues. Someone went bankrupt or beat her husband
>seven years ago (or whatever), I don't want to know about it. I'd rather
>ten (configurable) guilty men go free than one innocent man get punished.
>These are artificial boundaries, yes, but they're boundaries within which
>I'm comfortable living.

I think the reason (some) cypherpunks support things like offshore data
havens isn't that they think it's great to reduce the amount of privacy
people have.  Why would they support crypto and such if that were their
motivation?  The real reason is because we expect that such databases are
going to come into existence regardless of legal efforts.  They may be
"underground", or for that matter they may be run by governments
themselves, whom we are supposed to trust with our secrets.

The point is that the best countermeasure is to prevent the collection of
the data in the first place.  Ecash is better than credit cards for this
reason.  People should try to structure their lives so that as little
information is leaked about them as possible.  Relying on laws forbidding
people to keep information they have run across isn't likely to be
effective.

Now maybe the laws, while not perfect, can still at least reduce the
amount of this dataveillance.  The problem is, this is likely to lead
to a false sense of security, where people don't bother to protect
their own privacy because big brother is doing it for them.  We would
rather have these real privacy threats be right out in the open where
people can see them.

In a way, our position is like those revolutionaries who are convinced
the government is evil, while the populace mindlessly goes along with
the status quo.  Terrorists inflict terror largely to force the
government to crack down, raising popular awareness of its oppressive
nature, and fostering revolutionary feelings.

This is not the cypherpunk goal (as I see it) but still we share the
same sense of seeing trouble that most people aren't aware of.
Supporting offshore data havens, while harmful to privacy in the short
term, might at least awaken people to the problem.  If that leads to
greater awareness of the need to directly control the release of
information about themselves, then in the long run it will be good.

Hal