From hungary-online-owner Wed Mar 15 14:55:48 1995 Return-Path: owner-Hungary-Online-announce Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id OAA06566 for hungary-online-announce-out31415; Wed, 15 Mar 1995 14:55:48 -0800 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id OAA06556; Wed, 15 Mar 1995 14:55:33 -0800 Received: from carlson@odin.net () via =-=-=-=-=-= for hol-announce@hungary.yak.net (6554) Received: from odin.net (root@omega.odin.net [193.130.116.3]) (fnord) by nando (8.6.5/8.6.5) with ESMTP id OAA06544 for ; Wed, 15 Mar 1995 14:54:45 -0800 Received: from [193.130.116.13] by odin.net with SMTP (8.6.10/1.2-btv) id AAA29982; Thu, 16 Mar 1995 00:10:57 GMT Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Wed, 15 Mar 1995 23:50:07 +0100 To: hol-announce@hungary.yak.net From: carlson@odin.net (Steven Carlson) Subject: (HOL-A) HOL> Big Brother meets Digital Cash Sender: owner-Hungary-Online-announce@hungary.yak.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net I guess it's time I start writing the headlines for these pieces. Up to now it's been all I can manage to bash out a column and email it to the bbj on time. So far it's been up to them to brush it up and come up with an appropriate headline. The trouble is I don't usually like the heads they come up with. This latest is a case in point. =steve= --- hungary-online Big Brother meets digital cash by Steven Carlson The most important feature of digital cash is anonymity - guarding your and my financial records from other people's scrutiny. This feature also makes digital cash controversial, if not downright subversive. My father is a microelectronics engineer. We grew up a wired family. Daddy's no stranger to the digital revolution because he helped make it happen. He knows electronic money is coming - hell, he already manages his mutual funds through his modem. But mention digital cash and Daddy hits the ceiling. If all of us could send anonymous money spinning around the world, he argues, it would be paradise for the Cali cocaine cartel, the Mafia, the Chinese Tongs, the Russian Mob, and any two-bit hoodlum with a modem and a stash to hide. Why, it would probably create new kinds of crime we can't even imagine! And what incentive would there be for honest citizens to pay their taxes when the Joneses next door are banking in the Caymans over their PC? Governments would go broke. It would be complete and total anarchy. Funny enough, you get the same kind of response these days when you talk about encrypting communication. Industry wants to build encryption into our telephones and our email. Government and law enforcement want a way to crack the code when necessary. Unbreakable encryption, they say, would wrest an important tool from the hands of police. How could cops do their job without being able to tap a suspect's phone or monitor his email? How will police keep up with the criminal of the future who covers his tracks in a stream of garbled digits? We're talking complete and total anarchy. Scrambled phone conversations, anonymous cash transfers - the same technology makes it all possible: encryption. And the trouble is encryption is an either/or proposition. Either you protect your own privacy with unbreakable encryption, or the government gets a back door and you have to trust them not to abuse their power. Either you protect your own privacy with anonymous digital cash, or all electronic money transfers are traceable and you just hope that information doesn't get into the wrong hands. It's hard to talk about electronic privacy without sounding like a raving paranoic. So what if the government gets to tap your phone. What's to stop them now? So what if your credit cards and bank transfers leave a record. What have you got to hide? What indeed. In that case do you mind very much if I ask this friendly detective to follow you for the next few weeks? He won't get in the way. You won't even know he's there. But he'll know everything about you. Where you go. When. With whom. What you spend. On what. And maybe even what you're _going_ to spend. Think I'm exaggurating? I'm not. There's already plenty of data about you out here on computer databases and in filing cabinets. ATMs and public video cameras; school records, job records, medical records, credit records, criminal records - you name it. As computer networks link us together it gets even easier to link that data together. We're not just talking Big Brother here. We're talking Little Brother, Little Sister and Cousin Ed. You heard about Kevin Mitnick, the Super Hacker. What you probably didn't hear about is his sense of humor. At the age of 17, Mitnick stood before a judge who sentenced him to six months detention for breaking into a Pacific Bell computer. Once out of jail, Mitnick got his revenge by cracking a TRW computer and erasing that judge's credit record. If that isn't frightening enough, consider what governments could do with your data. Last year the US tax collectors, the Internet Revenue Service, revealed a project called the "Golden Eagle" return, in which the government would automatically gather all your relevant financial data, sort it, process it, and generate a tax return. Moreover they would feed this information to other government agencies, and well as state and city governments. Is that convenient? I don't know about you, but that scenario gives me nightmares. I'd like to see that my private data stays just that - private. To me, that means being able to spend at least part of my money in a way nobody else can possibly trace. It means having a phone conversation with the confidence nobody is listening in. And if these tools are also available to criminals - so be it. It's a desperate choice, but I'm ready to make it. It's not that I have anything to hide. It's just that some things are nobody else's business. [blurb] Steven Carlson is an Internet trainer and technology writer. --- Steven Carlson Moderator/Publisher - hungary-online Critical Mass Media Inc. Internet trainer, consultant [+361] 133-4647 in Budapest, Hungary carlson@odin.net ############# # This message to Hungary-Online-announce@hungary.yak.net # was from carlson@odin.net (Steven Carlson) # # To unsubscribe, # send "unsubscribe" to # For a full subscription (rather than this announcement-only subscription) # mail "subscribe" to # Send mail to for more information, # or to if you need human assistance. #############