Re: Judy Miller needing killing
Gil Hamilton wrote: I've never heard it disclosed how the prosecutor discovered that Miller had had such a conversation but it isn't relevant anyway. The question is, can she defy a subpoena based on membership in the privileged Reporter class that an ordinary person could not defy? Why not? while Miller could well be prosecuted for revealing the identity, had she done so - she didn't. Why should *anyone* be jailed for failing to reveal who they had talked to in confidence? I am all in favour of people being tried for their actions, but not for thoughtcrimes. On the other hand - Robert Novak got the same information, REPORTED it - and isn't in any sort of trouble at all. Somehow this isn't the issue though... and I wonder why? I don't know this either; perhaps because he immediately rolled over when he got subpoenaed? And yet Novak is the one who purportedly committed a crime - revealing the identity of an agent and thus endangering them. So the actual crime (of revealing) isn't important, but talking to a reporter is?
Re: Judy Miller needing killing
Dave Howe [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Gil Hamilton wrote: I've never heard it disclosed how the prosecutor discovered that Miller had had such a conversation but it isn't relevant anyway. The question is, can she defy a subpoena based on membership in the privileged Reporter class that an ordinary person could not defy? Why not? while Miller could well be prosecuted for revealing the identity, had she done so - she didn't. Why should *anyone* be jailed for failing to reveal who they had talked to in confidence? I am all in favour of people being tried for their actions, but not for thoughtcrimes. Miller wasn't prosecuted. She was not charged with a crime. She was not in danger of being charged if she had revealed the identity. She was jailed for contempt of court for obstructing a grand jury investigation by refusing to testify. Perhaps no one should be required to testify but current law here is that when subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating a possible crime, one is obliged to answer their questions except in a small number of exceptional circumstances (self-incrimination would be one example). Miller is seeking to be placed above the law that applies to the rest of us. And yet Novak is the one who purportedly committed a crime - revealing the identity of an agent and thus endangering them. So the actual crime (of revealing) isn't important, but talking to a reporter is? You're confused. AFAIK, no one has suggested that Novak commited a crime in this case. The actual crime (of revealing) is what the grand jury was attempting to investigate; Miller was jailed for obstructing that investigation. GH _ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
On 10/19/05, Daniel A. Nagy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.epointsystem.org/~nagydani/ICETE2005.pdf Note that nowhere in my paper did I imply that the issuer is a bank (the only mentioning of a bank in the paper is in an analogy). This is because I am strongly convinced that banks cannot, will not and should not be the principal issuers of digital cash-like payment vehicles. If you need explaination, I'm willing to provide it. I do not expect payment tokens to originate from withdrawals and end their life cycles being deposited to users' bank accounts. Suppose we consider your concept of a transaction chain, which is formed when a token is created based on some payment from outside the system, is maintained through exchanges of one token for another (we will ignore split and combine operations for now), and terminates when the token is redeemed for some outside-the-system value. Isn't it likely in practice that such transaction chains will be paid for and redeemed via existing financial systems, which are fully identified? A user will buy a token using an online check or credit card or some other non-anonymous mechanism. He passes it to someone else as a cash-like payment. Optionally it passes through more hands. Ultimately it is redeemed by someone who exchanges it for a check or deposit into a bank or credit card account. If you don't see this as the typical usage model, I'd like to hear your ideas. If this is the model, my concern is that in practice it will often be the case that there will be few intermediate exchanges. Particularly in the early stages of the system, there won't be that much to buy. Someone may accept epoints for payment but the first thing he will do is convert them to real money. A typical transaction will start with someone buying epoints from the issuer using some identified payment system, spending them online, and then the recipient redeems them using an identified payment system. The issuer sees exactly who spent, how much they spent and where they spent it. The result is that in practice the system has no anonymity whatsoever. It is just another way of transferring value online. Using currency is, essentially, a credit operation, splitting barter into the separate acts of selling and buying, thus making the promise to reciprocate (that is the eligibility to buy something of equal value from the buyer) a tradeable asset itself. It is the trading of this asset that needs to be anonymous, and the proposed system does a good enough job of protecting the anonymity of those in the middle of the transaction chains. The hard part is getting into the middle of those transaction chains. Until we reach the point where people receive their salaries in epoints, they will have little choice but to buy epoints for real money. That puts them at the beginning of a transaction chain and not in the middle. Sellers will tend to be at the end. The only people who could be in the middle would be those who sell substantially online for epoints and who also find things online that they can buy for epoints. But that will be a small fraction of users. For the rest of them, anonymity is not a sellling point of this system. If you take away the anonymity, is this technology still valuable? Does it have advantages over other online payment systems, like egold, credit cards or paypal? CP
Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
cyphrpunk wrote: If this is the model, my concern is that in practice it will often be the case that there will be few intermediate exchanges. Particularly in the early stages of the system, there won't be that much to buy. Someone may accept epoints for payment but the first thing he will do is convert them to real money. A typical transaction will start with someone buying epoints from the issuer using some identified payment system, spending them online, and then the recipient redeems them using an identified payment system. The issuer sees exactly who spent, how much they spent and where they spent it. The result is that in practice the system has no anonymity whatsoever. It is just another way of transferring value online. That's a merchant business model. Typically, that's not how payment systems emerge. Mostly, they emerge by a p2p model, and then migrate to a merchant model over time. How they start is generally a varied question, and somewhat a part of the inspiration of the Issuer. According to the Issuer's design, he may try and force that migration faster or slower. In a more forced system, there is typically only one or a few exchange points and that is probably the Issuer himself. If the Issuer also pushes a merchant design, and a triangular flow evolves, the tracing of transactions is relatively easy regardless of the system because time and amount give it away. But, typically, if the Issuer has designs on merchant business, he generally doesn't care about the hyphed non-tracking capabilities of the software, and also prefer the tracking to be easy for support and segmentation purposes. A game that Issuers often play is to pretend or market a system as privacy protecting, but if their intention is the merchant model then that game stops when the numbers get serious. (I gather they discuss that in the Paypal book if you want a written example.) Either way, it is kind of tough to criticise a software system for that. It's the Issuer and the market that sets the tune there; not the software system. The ideal software system allows the Issuer to decide these paramaters, but it is also kind of tough to provide all such paramaters in a big dial, and keep the system small and tight. (I suppose on this note, this is a big difference between Daniel's system and mine. His is small and tight and he talks about being able to audit the 5 page long central server ... mine is relatively large and complex, but it can do bearer and it can do fully traceable, as well as be passably extended to imitate of his design.) Meanwhile, the Issuers who want to provide privacy with a bog standard double entry online accounts system still have a better record of doing that than any other Issuers that might have boasted mathematical blah blah, they just run theirs privately. e.g., your average Swiss bank. iang
Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
I will provide a detailed answer a bit later, but the short answer is that anonymity and untraceability are not major selling points, as experience shows. After all, ATMs could easily record and match to the user the serial numbers of each banknote they hand out, yet, there seems to be no preference to coins vs. banknotes. The major selling point, as noted in the paper and in the presentation is that the security (and hence the transaction cost manifesting itself in the effort required for each transaction) scales with transaction value. For paying pennies, you just type, say, 12-character codes. Yet, if the transaction value warrants it, you can have a full-fledged, digitally signed audit trail within the same system. And it's completely up to the users to decide what security measures to take. Another important issue is that you never risk more than the transaction value. There is no identity to be stolen. So, in short, the selling point is flexible and potentially very high security against all sorts of threats. Someone finding out who you might be is not, by far, the most serious threat in a payment system. -- Daniel
Re: Judy Miller needing killing
On 10/18/05, Major Variola (ret.) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So this dupe/spy/wannabe journalist thinks that journalists should be *special*.. how nice. Where in the 1st amendment is the class journalists mentioned? She needs a WMD enema. We put up with this needs killing crap from Tim May because he was imaginative and interesting, at least when he could shake free from his racism and nihilism. You on the other hand offer nothing but bilious ignorance. If you don't have anything to say, how about if you just don't say it? The notion that someone who is willing to spend months in jail just to keep a promise of silence needs killing is beyond bizarre and is downright evil. This list supports the rights of individuals to tell the government to go to hell, and that is exactly what Judy Miller did. She should be a hero around here. It's disgusting to see these kinds of comments from a no-nothing like Major Variola. CP
Re: Judy Miller needing killing
cyphrpunk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The notion that someone who is willing to spend months in jail just to keep a promise of silence needs killing is beyond bizarre and is downright evil. Straw man alert. MV's notion is that a person who thinks journalists should be a special class of people who enjoy freedom of press (while, presumably, the rest of us don't) needs killing. That this person happens also to have spent months in jail, c, is unhappy coincidence. This list supports the rights of individuals to tell the government to go to hell, and that is exactly what Judy Miller did. She should be a hero around here. It's disgusting to see these kinds of comments from a no-nothing like Major Variola. I agree that her actions with regard to the Grand Jury situation are commendable (especially in light of my belief that the entire Grand Jury process is one of the most broken parts of our present legal system). Nevertheless, calling for the creation of a (licensed?) journalist class is stupidity so pure it's almost immoral. Repeat after me: we are all journalists. -- Riad S. Wahby [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
Let's take a look at Daniel Nagy's list of desirable features for an ecash system and see how simple, on-line Chaum ecash fares. http://www.epointsystem.org/~nagydani/ICETE2005.pdf One of the reasons, in the author s opinion, is that payment systems based on similar schemes lack some key characteristics of paper-based cash, rendering them economically infeasible. Let us quickly enumerate the most important properties of cash: 1. Money doesn't smell. Cash payments are -- potentially -- _anonymous_ and untraceable by third parties (including the issuer). This is of course the main selling point of Chaum's system, where it excels. I will point out that defining cash as merely potentially anonymous leaves a loophole whereby fully non-anonymous systems get to call themselves cash. This underplays the strength of Chaum's system. It is not just potentially anonymous, it has a strong degree of anonymity. 2. Cash payments are final. After the fact, the paying party has no means to reverse the payment. We call this property of cash transactions _irreversibility_. Certainly Chaum ecash has this property. Because deposits are unlinkable to withdrawals, there is no way even in principle to reverse a transaction. 3. Cash payments are _peer-to-peer_. There is no distinction between merchants and customers; anyone can pay anyone. In particular, anybody can receive cash payments without contracts with third parties. Again this is precisely how Chaum ecash works. Everyone can receive ecash and everyone can spend it. There is no distinction between buyers and vendors. Of course, transactions do need the aid of the issuer, but that is true of all online payment systems including Daniel's. 4. Cash allows for acts of faith or _naive transactions_. Those who are not familiar with all the antiforgery measures of a particular banknote or do not have the necessary equipment to verify them, can still transact with cash relying on the fact that what they do not verify is nonetheless verifiable in principle. I have to admit, I don't understand this point, so I can't say to what extent Chaum ecash meets it. In most cases users will simply use their software to perform transactions and no familiarity is necessary with any antiforgery or other technical measures in the payment system. In this sense all users are naive and no one is expected to be a technical expert. Chaum ecash works just fine in this model. 5. The amount of cash issued by the issuing authority is public information that can be verified through an auditing process. This is the one aspect where Chaum ecash fails. It is a significant strength of Daniel Nagy's system that it allows public audits of the amount of cash outstanding. However note that if the ecash issuer stands ready to buy and sell ecash for real money then he has an incentive not to excessively inflate his currency as it would create liabilities which exceed his assets. Similarly, in a state of competition between multiple such ecash issuers, any currency which over-inflates will be at a disadvantage relative to others, as discussed in Dan Selgin's works on free banking. Daniel Nagy also raised a related point about insider malfeasance, which is also a potential problem with Chaum ecash, but there do exist technologies such as hardware security modules which can protect keys in a highly secure manner and make sure they are used only via authorized protocols. Again, the operators of the ecash system have strong incentives to protect their keys against insider attacks. The payment system proposed in (D. Chaum, 1988) focuses on the first characteristic while partially or totally lacking all the others. In summary, I don't think this is true at all. At least the first three characteristics are met perfectly by Chaumian ecash, and possibly the fourth is met in practice as naive users can access the system without excessive complications. Only the fifth point, the ability for outsiders to monitor the amount of cash in circulation, is not satisfied. But even then, the ecash mint software, and procedures and controls followed by the issuer, could be designed to allow third party audits similarly to how paper money cash issuers might be audited today. There do exist technical proposals for ecash systems such as that from Sander and Ta-Shma which allow monitoring the amount of cash which has been issued and redeemed while retaining anonymity and unlinkability, but those are of questionable efficiency with current technology. Perhaps improved versions of such protocols could provide a payment system which would satisfy all of Daniel Nagy's desiderata while retaining the important feature of strong anonymity. CP
Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
Thank you for the detailed critique! I think, we're not talking about the same Chaumian cash. The referred 1988 paper proposes an off-line system, where double spending compromises anonymity and results in transaction reversal. I agree with you that it was a mistake on my part to deny its peer-to-peer nature; should be more careful in the future. I strongly disagree that potentially anonymous systems do not deserve to be called cash. For the past approx. 100 years, banknotes have been used as cash and there seems to be no preference on the market for coins, even though banknotes have unique serial numbers and are, therefore, traceable. I maintain, that anonymity and untraceability are primarily not privacy concerns but -- to some extent -- necessary conditions for irreversibility, which is the ture reason why cash is such a mainstay in commerce and why I would expect its electronic equivalent would be a desirable financial instrument in the world of electronic commerce. In a low-trust environment, irreversible payments are preferable to reversible ones. Simple on-line Chaumian blinded tokens, where the value is determined by the public key and the signed content is unimportant, as long as it is unique, are more like coins. And the most serious problem with them is that of transparent governance. Unfortunately, those hyperinflating their currency are not caught early enough. One way to handle this problem is by expiring tokens. For example, for each value, keys can be introduced in a brick-wall pattern: keys are replaced in regular intervals with two keys being valid at all times, with one expiring in the middle of the lifetime of the other. Tokens signed by the old key are always excahnged for those signed by the new one. This would allow a regular re-count of all tokens in circulation (by the time a key expires, at most as many tokens would have been exchanged for the next key as have been issued), but it raises other concerns. With simple blinded tokens, naive transactions are possible only with the already unblinded ones. One can accept them on faith, and pass on without exchanging. This does not require additional equipment/software. I know of no protocol for transfering blinded tokens with a receipt, but I do not rule out the possibility of its existence. Without it, however, the blinded tokens are useful for a very narrow range of transaction values. Namely, those small enough not to be bothered about receipts, but large enough so that the effort of making a payment does not exceed the transaction value. This confines their usability to part of the micropayment market. To reiterate, the main advantage of the proposed system is that it allows for a very large range of transaction values by providing adequate security for high-value ones, while requiring extremely little effort for low-value ones. And all that at the sole discretion of the users. Regards, -- Daninel
Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
On Thu, 20 Oct 2005, cyphrpunk wrote: system without excessive complications. Only the fifth point, the ability for outsiders to monitor the amount of cash in circulation, is not satisfied. But even then, the ecash mint software, and procedures and controls followed by the issuer, could be designed to allow third party audits similarly to how paper money cash issuers might be audited today. One approach, investigated by Hal Finney, is to run the mint on a platform that allows remote attestation. Check out rpow.net - he has a working implementation of a proof of work payment system hosted on an IBM 4758. -David Molnar
