[79287] in Cypherpunks
Re: Fingerprint Stego
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Hal Finney)
Wed Apr 30 00:41:00 1997
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 17:48:06 -0700
From: Hal Finney <hal@rain.org>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Reply-To: Hal Finney <hal@rain.org>
Last week I saw a program on PBS which discussed some general privacy
issues and even got into crypto and anonymity. It was part of their
four-part series on the ideas discussed in the Federalist Papers, called
"Liberty and Limits".
The show was structured as a panel discussion in which the moderator
proposes scenarios and asks for reactions by panel members as though
they were participants in the events. They started off with the case
of a town which wants to get fingerprints from the new little league
coach before letting her start working. She was played by the head of
the ACLU and didn't think much of that idea, of course.
They got into some computer issues, with writer James Gleick playing a
private investigator type who could get any kind of information on anybody
via computer databases. Should he be hired to vet the new teacher at
the private school? Should this even be allowed?
There was also discussion of crypto. The bad guys are using it to
communicate and the cops can't read it. The D.A. on the panel insisted
that all they wanted was the ability to do what they've been doing for
years, get access to the data with a warrant. Gleick said that everybody
should have crypto, and in a few years they'd all see what he meant. They
even got into anonymity - should it be legal, the Supreme court upheld it,
the Federalist papers were pseudonymous, etc.
It wouldn't break much new ground for list readers, but I was very pleased
to see discussion of these topics in a relatively mainstream forum like
this. Of course they're not going to get the ratings of ER but still this
will help get more people thinking about our issues. If this series gets
rebroadcast, check it out. This was the third show in the series,
"Privacy and Security".
Hal
