The basic objective, for campaign financing, is highly bogus -
there's this First Amendment thing that, while sometimes honored
more in the breach than the observance, protects freedom of speech and the
press.
When you're talking about commerce or obscenity on the net, pro-censorship
types say
"oh, no, the First Amendment isn't about them - it's about Political Speech!".
So when we ARE talking about political speech, they shouldn't be allowed
to get away with saying "But electoral politics is too important to let
*everybody* print what they want about it."
Philosophy aside, cypherpunks technology makes it easy for Alice
to bribe Bob The Politician to send him the money by one channel,
and send a message by another channel claiming to have paid the bribe.
(Bribe, independent campaign finance expenditure, whatever. :-)
The issue is whether you can do it in a way that Bob knows
that Alice isn't lying about having sent the money (either because
nobody sent the money, or because somebody else sent the money
and she's taking credit for it.) Bearer payments help a lot with this.
Of course, it's nice if Alice can know Bob received the money,
and that once he's been bribed he'll stay bribed.
Sending the bearer payment encrypted, and following it with the key
in response to a receipt can be helpful.
If you use the proposed "mandatory anonymous donation" protocol,
you can still send a message saying you paid the bribe -
it's just easier to claim that you've done it when you haven't.
Bill
At 12:06 PM 04/14/2000 -0400, dmolnar wrote:
>
>Hi,
>
>The recent article reminds me -- did anyone see Tomas Sander and
>Matt Franklin's presentation at CFP on "Deniable Payments and
>Electronic Campaign Finance"? What did you think?
>
>http://www.cfp2000.org/papers/franklin.pdf
>
>Their idea is to take the "mandated donor anonymity" proposed by
>Ian Ayres & Jeremy Bulow
>http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/faculty/bulow.pdf
>
>and build a protocol which allows everyone to ensure that donations are
>going to the correct candidate, without revealing anything about who
>donated to whom.
>
>Thanks,
>-David
>
>
>
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
