At 10:29 PM -0400 4/12/00, dmolnar wrote:
>On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>
>> Simson is a smart fellow, and a friend. But he does believe in aggressive
>> federal regulation of private sector data collection practices.
>
>Indeed. That is why I mentioned him in response to your note that data
>collection is an area which seems to currently lack a strong
>"cypherpunk"-ish response to his point of view.
>
>I'm also interested in your comment that contract law may be sufficient to
>combat this problem. Garfinkle raises and then dismisses the idea of
>considering personal information as "property", and then developing the
>notion of rights and contract which we have for other property for
>personal information. Who has treated this from the other side, the
>libertarian/anarchist/whatever you want to call it viewpoint? is there
>a good introduction to "contract law and personal data" lying around
>someplace?
Look, David, Simson Garfinkel (or Garfinckle, or whatever) is a
_journalist_. A journalist who now thinks he's a policy writer. He
has written yet another book in the series of books dealing with how
"there ought be laws" about privacy and the power of corporations.
(Other such books have come from folks like Caroline Kennedy
Somethingoother and the usual pack of journalists.)
Why do you think that our _refutations_ of Garfinkle will get 0.1% of
the attention Garfinkle's book will get?
I faced this issue a couple of years ago, when Chris Peterson of the
Foresight Institute, a libertarian/nanotechnology non-profit
organization (ugh, non-profit! ;-)), tried to recruit me to help them
mount a rebuttal to David Brin's transparently flaky ideas in his
"The Transparent Society" book. I refused, citing better things to do
than to dance on the puppet strings pulled by Brin. That, and because
_books_ already exist to refute his views.
If people won't read Friedman or Hayek or Rand or Nozick or whatever,
why will they read the refutations from folks like us?
David Friedman, not Milton. He has written on contract law
extensively, especially in anarchic situations. And there is much
literature on "polycentric" or "private" law, ranging from the
interesting fictional treatments by Neal Stephenson to more scholarly
treatments such as "The Enterprise of Law."
These statists who argue for more laws, more men with guns, more
rules, more interference in contracts...how can they be easily
refuted by folks like us with no podium?
What are we going to do, craft the "Cypherpunks Response to Simson Garfinkel"?
Garfinkel is a nice enough guy, as they all are, mostly, but he
hasn't been here on our list participating in a debate. And even if
he had, like some of our socialists, so what/
He's written his book. He thinks more laws are needed. End of story.
Think of it as evolution in action.
--Tim May
--
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Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
