It is hard to argue with Perry's point that privacy in public is an endangered species at best. Suggesting that one confine one's illegal actions to the virtual world is not a particularly appealing response.
Robin Hanson considered the problem in this article from back in the 1990s, a response to the heyday of the Cypherpunks: http://hanson.gmu.edu/privacy.html He argued that virtual privacy would not be an adequate substitute for the loss of physical privacy, that people would not be willing to make the sacrifices necessary for a fully anonymous (or pseudonymous) online existence. It's possible nevertheless that online substitutes for many questionable physical activities may arise. People don't need to shop at adult bookstores any more, porn being widely available online. Instructions on making or growing your own drugs can also be found. Not everything we do in the physical world can yet be virtualized but perhaps with increased recognition of the problem, more substitutes will become available. You don't have to buy into the Cypherpunk picture of a set of fully protected "nyms" using Chaumian credentials to transfer attributes, in order to benefit still from the relatively large degree of anonymity and privacy available online. It may also be helpful to focus more directly on specific harms and specific limitations rather than the rather vague and general issue of privacy and its intangible benefits. Scientific American has a number of articles on this topic in its most recent issue. http://www.sciam.com/sciammag (Also includes a nice article by Anna Lysyanskaya on cryptographic credentials BTW. Her work with Jan Camenisch on this topic remains state of the art for those who still retain hope for the technology. TPM DAA is based on CL signatures and ironically may become the first widely fielded use of anonymous credentials.) Hal Finney --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
