From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 13:03:28 +0800
To: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
Subject: Re: Brit Fascists To Track Motorists - DigiCash Obsolescent
In-Reply-To: <199707231815.UAA09529@basement.replay.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970724185429.00772da4@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 02:34 AM 7/24/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
>On Wed, Jul 23, 1997 at 01:59:00PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
>[...]
>> And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided
>> it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside
>> of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes...
>> The rest of it's just implementation details.
>
>Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and
>leave the license plate off. 

If the government wants to take over all the public commons right-of-way
and pave it for roads, I'm not saying I'm not willing to pay them
for the use of all their nice concrete and asphalt*, though 
government-built roads have led to a whole lot of ecological and social
problems that are far more severe than those a free-market road system
would have given us; free-marketers without eminent domain would have
built fewer roads in generally more efficient places because they'd need 
to make money on each one, though eminent domain may be enough of a 
cost-saver to make up for lower efficiency, and housing and business 
development would have organized more compactly around the roads and
railroads that did get built, allowing less car use.

But the government could have given us all license plates that say 
[StateName][Year] in big letters and the tax receipt in small letters
instead of [CarIdentifier][StateColor] in big and [Year][Receipt#] in small 
like most states do today or [CarIdentifier] in big letters on the back
and [InspectionMonth][YearColor] on the windshield like New Jersey does.
Somehow cops manage to zing people for late car tax payment anyway,
and somehow tax collectors manage to collect taxes on real estate
(which doesn't move, but has owners that do) and wages (paid by often-
mobile businesses to often-mobile workers) and sales well enough without
requiring big taxpayer id# signs on houses, wallets, and merchandise.
And somehow before the automobile we got by without license plates on
horses and buggies and cows, though some people branded their horses or 
cows or painted their names on buggies without the law requiring it
so they could demonstrate ownership if there was a dispute.

The choice to require easy-to-use-rapidly unique identifiers or not 
affects the kinds of transactions that can be done with them.
License plate numbers are primarily useful for social control,
though they're occasionally useful for recovering stolen cars
(if the thieves didn't use fake plates) or following slow white Broncos.
As computers and radio communications increase the speed and 
flexibility of transactions, there are more ways to use them
(cops can look up license plates any time they stop cars, allowing them
to identify dangerous criminals who are too dumb to use fake plates)
mostly for social control, but also to enforce tax collection.

They also make it easier to charge for transactions such as
bridge and freeway use - but they bias the economics towards an
account-based system (since you've got an existing key)
rather than a pay-as-you-go system (like subway tokens or turnpike tolls)
or a pay-by-the-month system (like many transit systems offer,
even for systems like BART and CalTrain that are well equipped for
distance-based billing and some bridge tolls.)  Changing the
transaction costs changes the possible relationships between
supplier and customer, and if the government wants to use them
for social control, some of those relationships make it easier.

[*There are people who refuse to get car license plates and
driver's licenses and marriage licenses and pay taxes on principle, and 
they spend a lot of time arguing common law to judges and cops.
I'm not one of them - as George Gordon says, if you're not having fun
doing this kind of thing, you shouldn't be wasting your time doing it,
and you also risk losing and setting bad precedents.  Our buddy Jim
Bell may or may not agree by this point in time....]

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)