[CLUE-Talk] The Advance of the Surveillance Society

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sat, 20 Jul 2002 21:17:07 -0600
David Anselmi <anselmi at americanisp.net> wrote:

> Jed S. Baer wrote:
> > Well, apparently any financial transactions other than cash,
> > person-to-person, have no protection under the 4th ammendment.
> > 
> > http://my.sybase.com/detail?id=1019355
> 
> IIRC, the technical issues for digital cash have been solved.  Sadly it 
> seems to have fewer peripheral revenue streams than things like credit 
> cards so I'm not sure how we go about getting it to be widely used. 
> Maybe Matt Gushee can use it in his local economy boosting.

Well, Dave, depending upon whom you ask, the digital cash issues aren't in
as good a shape as the purveyors of those systems would have us believe.
Everything I've read about the issues of security WRT digital cash depend
upon PKI - Public Key Infrastructure. Digital identity is of course, a key
component as well, and such systems also use PKI. After reading the
following paper from Counterpane Labs, I'm uncertain anyone can say the
problems are solved.  http://www.counterpane.com/pki-risks.html
(Ellison/Schneier)

The "ring of trust" described by proponents of PGP type public-key
encryption addresses only one of the risks Counterpane describes - and
then perhaps imperfectly.

The issue which is of more concern to me (in this context) however, would
be that I suspect digital cash would fall under the same provisions of
USAPA, for "know your customer and their source of funds". Wouldn't a
"repository" managing digital cash be the essential equivalent of a bank,
or, similar to PayPal, be a transfer agent? Unless you're talking about a
Bermuda company, perhaps.

I was actually thinking about the same issues WRT to a LETS.