On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 01:21:52AM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
| At 03:57 PM 12/19/2002 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:
| >On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 04:56:12PM -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
| >| I think this would help, but I also think technology is driving a lot of
| >| this. You don't have to give a lot more information to stores today than
| >| you did twenty years ago for them to be much more able to track what you
| >| buy and when you buy it and how you pay, just because the available
| >| information technology is so much better. Surveilance cameras, DNA
| >| testing, identification by iris codes, electronic payment mechanisms that
| >| are much more convenient than cash most of the time, all these contribute
| >| to the loss of privacy in ways that are only partly subject to any kind
| >of
| >| government action (or inaction) or law.
|
| But you *do* have to provide a lot more information to your bank
| than you used to, and to your mailbox company, and to the government-run
| post-offices that can bully private mailbox companies around,
| and to hotels, and to driver-safety-and-car-taxation enforcers,
| and to airlines, because governments either require them to collect more,
| or encourage them to collect more data, and to collect it in forms that
| are easier to correlate than they have been in the past,
What's information, Mr. Smith? If I walk in and say my name's John
Doe, here's my cash, and there isn't any government ID, who can
question me?
| >Yep. A lot of it, however, freeloads on the government certification
| >of identity. Without the legal threats, it would be much harder to
| >assemble the data. (Other things, like credit, also become much
| >harder. That may become less of an issue as id theft makes credit
| >visibly a two-edged sword.
|
| While some of it is freeloading on the identity certification,
| much of it is done because it's so cheap to do so they might as well,
| and it's cheap because of the government regulations
| as well as because computation keeps getting radically cheaper.
The cheap to do is freeloading. If you take all the government issued
ID out of your wallet, how much of what's left has the same name on
it?
Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a
credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in
the name Doe.
If I pull out all three, the cost of doing it shoots way up, and I pay
in cash.
Adam
--
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
-Hume
