From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 12:39:51 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Gore Commission wants to regulate the Net like broadcast
In-Reply-To: <v03102800b0ec84e6fcb8@[208.129.55.202]>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980122173404.0083e100@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>>These attempts at regulation show just how terrified they are of true free
>>speech and every man a publisher.
>
>Yes, they need "choke points" to control the anarchy.
>
>As with the British plan to license a series of "certificate authorities,"
>or U.S. plans/wishes to do the same thing, this effectively forces all
>citizen-units to sign up with one of the authorized certificate issuers.
>(This is why certificate-based systems are so heinous.)

It's not just the government - the mass media have been scared of the
Net for a long time because it disintermediates them.  
The recent flap about the Drudge Report and the lack of fact-checking 
and quality is a good example of that - the spin has been very negative 
about the dangers of uncontrolled, uncensored, unthrottled speech.
An alternative spin could be to emphasize signal-to-noise and the
far better quality of information that traditional media can provide.

While I've got some disagreements about James Donald's explanations of
Crypto Kong's model (no need for CAs, etc. vs. the simple approaches
for replicating the Web Of Trust and CAs using his tools),
once nice thing about it is that you don't use anything called a 
"certificate" - it just compares whether a message is signed by the
same key that a previous message was.  That previous message can be
a vanilla message, or an introductory note from someone (Alice saying
that Bob's key is 457HLJCR8YFDG7807FG7FD87G, and that this is the
Bob she met at the Peace Center fundraiser), or a note from Catbert
the HR Director saying Bob works at MegaFooBar, or a note from
BankFoo that the checks from account 23123124 need to be signed by
key 93243248329048.  While they work like key signatures, they don't
look like CA signatures, they look like ordinary correspondence.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639