E-Money

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Mr. Steven Levy writes an admirable article on "E-Money" in 
December Wired, with emphasis on Chaum's venture, along with 
various opinions of e-cash systems, the role of cryptography 
and the salient thoughts of Mr. Eric Hughes.

Mr. Levy, I pray, will excuse my quoting two provocative 
excerpts to induce reading the whole piece:

"Corleta Brueck, the project manager for the IRS's Document 
Processing System, described some of the IRS's plans.  These 
include the so-called 'Golden Eagle' return, in which the 
government automatically gathers all relevant aspects of a 
person's finances, sorts them into approriate categories and 
then tallies the tax due.  'One stop service,' as Brueck puts 
it.  This information would be fed to other government 
agencies, as well as states and municipalities, which would 
draw upon it for their own purposes.  She vows 'absolutely' 
that this will happen, assuming that Americans will be grateful 
to be relieved of the burden of filing any taxes.  The 
government will simply take its due." . . .

"[Brueck continues] 'We know everyting about you that we need 
to know.  Your employer tells us everything about you that we 
need to know. Your activity records on your credit cards tell 
us everything about you that we need to know.  Through 
interface with Social Security, with the DMV, with your banking 
institutions, we really have a lot of information . . . We 
could literally file a return for you.  This is the future we'd 
like to go to.' "

* * *

"It isn't the future that David Chaum would like to go to, and 
in hopes of preventing that degree of openess in an 
individual's affairs, he continues doggedly in his crusade for 
privacy. . . . He thinks that if an economic system that tracks 
all transactions comes to cyberspace, the result would be much 
worse than in the physical world.  'Cyberspace doesn't have all 
the physical constraints,' he says.  'There are not walls . . . 
it's a different, scary, weird place, and with identification 
it's a panopticon nightmare.' "

End quotes.

And, yes, for the Chaum-uncharmed, Mr. Chaum was rude to Mr. 
Levy.  Whether Mr. L. is rude in kind to Mr. C. is an exercise 
left to the reader.