From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 17:57:01 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Whistleblowing on the Internet
Message-ID: <199609030615.XAA15838@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 04:02 PM 9/2/96 EDT, "E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU> wrote:
>There's also the point that some whistleblowing isn't exactly
>what some political groups would want to occur. For instance, opponents
>to unions such as myself aren't going to want a whistleblower to be able
>conveniently to report their exclusion from a job due to union membership.

While some unions are clearly run by and for thugs, some employers have
also hired thugs to attack union organizers, and both unions and employers
have convinced government thugs to attack their opponents, though unions
generally have convinced governments to write laws with fines attached,
while employers have often had actual Federal troops shooting union strikers,
and have had police refrain from defending strikers from attack.

In a free market, there wouldn't be laws requiring or forbidding union
membership, and some unions would prosper by providing good service to their
members and to the employers that hire them, while others wouldn't.

I'd be happy to see union members able to anonymously blow the whistle on
employers that blacklist union members, though it's harder to be credible
with the public if you're anonymous, and particularly hard to get people to
believe
"Employer MegaFooBar refused to hire [name deleted for privacy], 
a member of the IBCPARO, because of his union membership" without
revealing enough about the union member's identity that the employer knows,
and therefore telling all other employers to know that the guy is not
only a union member, but also a troublemaker.

In this case, the technology is more strongly useful for maintaining
blacklists than for detecting or outing blacklist users.
Unfortunately, that's especially true because government taxation and
anti-immigrant policies require that employees provide employers with
a [mostly] unique ID number and papers to prove who they are,
so you can't just show up at a construction-workers' hiring hall,
call yourself Joe, and get your pay in cash at the end of the day.
(Unless you're already an illegal immigrant, in which case it works fine,
but then it's tough to be a union member.)


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> 	
# You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto