-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 3:31 AM -0700 on 6/29/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] paints a picture out of the second "Planet of the Apes" movie, Roddy McDowell, Ceasar Romero, and all...:
> An AGGRESSIVE approach, barging into the citadels of power, > ripping the blinds, opening the windows, protecting the > whistleblowers, siccing elites against each other, unleashing a > myriad news-hounds and generally stripping the big boys naked! In other words, using the nation-state (a mob by any other name smells just same) to solve a technological, a physical, problem. Shall we legislate pi, while we're at it? I think my original point about Brin "trusting" the nation-state -- one I thought fairly tangential to my review of Wayner's excellent "Translucent Databases", though apparently not tangential enough -- is proven above, and throughout Dr. Brin's latest fulmination. Meet the new mob, same as the old mob, with a nod to Mr. Townsend and the now late Mr. Entwhistle. Sure, we're going to have ubiquitous *supervision* of *property* using exponentially cheaper charge-coupled camera devices attached to geodesic internetworks. Moore's, Metcalfe's, Gilder's(?) "laws", will not be denied. But it will be increasingly done by property owners, and not by nation states. I think that Brin used his entire book to grope for that same point, but, apparently, he can't see beyond his own statist nose to the ultimate answer to the problem he poses there. That's because, cryptography, and financial cryptography in particular, is not just about anonymity. It is, ultimately, about the control of property, and without the use of force, much less the monopolistic use of force found in a nation-state, or any other form of mob rule. :-). First, encrypted information -- like informed opinion, the most important thing in a ubiquitously networked world -- actually becomes property, in the sense that if information, "content", whatever, is encrypted, and I have the key, it's my property, to do with what I want, including selling it to someone else. The more strong cryptography there is in the network, the more that becomes so. I do not define Microsoft/WAVE/AMD's digital "rights" "management" attempts in this regard as strong cryptography, of course. Ronald Coase, who first noted that property is necessary for the existence of a market, much less an economy, is smiling somewhere, I bet. Second, and most important to what I'm interested in, protocols like those of Chaum, Brands, and Wagner, and others every year, are all designed to *anonymously* transfer ownership of assets, particularly financial assets. It is that deliberate anonymity of design that paradoxically makes exchanges of those assets cheaper to use because you don't need *identity*, Mr. Brin's cherished "transparency", to do business anymore. If it's cheaper to do it privately instead of keeping an ostensibly public database at a "trusted" third party, and sending someone to jail if they lie about a debit or a credit, then, obviously, we'll use functionally anonymous bearer-transaction financial cryptography protocols instead of the "transparent" book-entry settlement systems we now use. "Transparency", like privacy, is orthogonal to transaction cost. Look at it this way. If it were cheaper to use anonymous paper bearer certificates hauled in armored trucks than it is to do batch, then interactive book-entry transaction settlement, using mainframe and then client-server over securely transported tape and now proprietary communication networks, then we'd still use Brinks trucks, vaults and cages, and wallets full of paper to do business with each other. But that's not what we do, and, frankly, if it's cheaper to do anonymous bearer-transaction financial cryptography protocols on a public internetwork then we'll do that instead of the current "trusted", "transparent" book-entry regime backed up by monopolistic government force. By the same, um, token, :-), if you reduce transaction cost, firm size goes down, and that means that, maybe, someday, we do not even "buy" (pay for it gunpoint at tax-time) force from governments anymore. Surveillance of citizens so they don't break the law becomes supervision of your property so people don't damage it. Dr. Brin says something about never hearing of "society", much less a nation-state, that succeeded in an atmosphere of ubiquitous personal privacy, and, oddly enough, I believe he's right. First, we haven't been able to organize in large groups without force monopolies until now, and second, of course, nation-states probably can't survive in a world of ubiquitous strong financial cryptography and geodesic internetworks. That, by the way, is why I was happy to review Peter Wayner's book, "Translucent Databases", which, not so tangentially, now, is the ultimate topic under discussion here. Using simple techniques, Wayner shows that we can have as much anonymity as we like in a database, and, among other things, it's because we can do the encryption in the client if we want. Exactly what is done in blind signature bearer-certificate financial cryptography, something Wayner only skirts a couple of times in the book itself because it's a more advanced solution to the original problem. Which was my point, all along. If it's cheaper to use encryption, in terms of transaction cost, liability to various risk, and so on, then we'll use cryptography, up to, and including, functional anonymity. As far as Dr. Brin's particular world view goes, if internet databases are "translucent", the cameras feeding those databases become "translucent" as well. So, if it's in the interest of the *owner* of the *property* being watched by the camera to reveal that information, or even sell it, then that information will be used. Otherwise, it won't. I expect most, if not all information, in databases and going over the net to be encrypted sooner or later, and not to smash the state, or to promote it, but because it's cheaper, safer, less personally and financially risky, to do so. So much for the "Transparent Society". Finally, as to the mechanics of this discussion, I didn't reply to Dr. Brin directly because he didn't reply to *me*, directly, when he had the beef in the first place. Monkey see, monkey do, I suppose. He had my email address. He knew how to use it. And, of course, there was no reason to send him my review of Wayner's book "Translucent Databases", any more than anyone else referring to his ideas would, except to curry his favor, or something. Among other things, The review itself is public. Hell, it even got Slashdotted this week, though I wish I had corrected spelling and grammar a bit more there before I punched the "Submit" button on the review instead of concentrating on the HTML so much. Fortunately, various mail lists, and Dr. Brin through various intermediaries, got the better version. The geodesic network wins again. As to misquoting him, I think his pair of recent emetica on the subject have "quoted" Dr. Brin quite well enough for my taste, thank you very much. I did not "lie", much less misrepresent his views, as most people reading those two missives can see now from his own words. Last but not least, I certainly didn't have to buy his book to have an opinion about his ideas on politics and on transparency itself. Before I got interested in financial cryptography on the net and understood its implications and knew better, I had read most of Brin's prior work, including "Earth", where the "transparency" idea was presented in fiction. His public pronouncements, on the net, in the press, and elsewhere since his non-fiction book's publication have made his point, and rather vociferously, as we've now seen. I suppose it would have been much better to have civil discourse with the man, but he's the one who came out swinging. At the moment I feel an awful lot like someone in a scene from a Monty Python movie. Let's hope he continues to have fewer limbs to swing with at every iteration of this exchange... Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPR3Ob8PxH8jf3ohaEQKELACcDBFyfgcTo0rksdr+1TVSph+fS0YAn0t6 cksW0bOjj1Xop2tgkKTTwATv =9LhI -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
