On Saturday, September 21, 2002, at 02:16 AM, Blanc wrote:
> Interesting little article from
> http://pass.maths.org.uk/issue21/news/random_privacy/index.html:
>
> Excerpt:
> How old are you? How much do you earn?
>
Not a new idea. Ted Nelson (IIRC) wrote about using coin flips to
randomize AIDS poll questions. ("Have you engaged in unprotected sex?"
Flip a coin and XOR it with your actual answer.) I remember talking to
Eric Hughes, Phil Salin, and others around 1990-91 about this.
(However, IBM is probably busily copyrighting their new invention, just
as Intel copyright their recent "invention" of the anonymous remailer.)
Of course, both the IBM approach and the Nelson approach are unworkable
for 98% of the population, who neither understand such abstractions nor
are willing to trust them.
BTW, folks should be careful not to click on or clip the part of the
URL line that includes the colon.
I just did some Web spelunking, looking for the above-referenced
connection. Couldn't find it, but found my own references from around
1994 (in the Cyphernomicon, natch). Here's a more recent item I sent to
the list, an excerpt:
"
(BTW, as you probably know or can imagine, there have been crypto
methods proposed for safeguarding certain kinds of data collection,
e.g., schemes using "random coin flip protocols" for answering questions
like "Are you homosexual?" (supposedly "useful" for public health
planners trying to deal with HIV/AIDS issues. The idea is that the
pollee XORs his answer with a random bit. His answer then doesn't
_implicate_ him, but overall statistics can still be deduced from a
large enough sample. Ho hum. Better to simply tell the poller "None of
your fucking business...get off my property.")
The core point is the familiar one: we are coming to, or have reached, a
fork in the road. Down one path lies the Surveillance State, the
Panopticon, with ubiquitous cameras, intrusive questions, restrictions
on untraceable spending, and other detritus of the police state. Down
the other path lies a universe of strong crypto with a web of "opaque
pipes" linking "opaque objects."
Technologists can make the second path the reality. Lawyers and
lawmakers will try to take us down the first path.
"
--Tim May
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also
into you." -- Nietzsche
