Dossier on Rick Smith is Easily Obtainable

["Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>]

At 3:41 PM -0600 11/12/96, Rick Smith wrote:

>When faced with peculiar situations I try to choose a disclosure that
>meets whatever the immediate requirements are but doesn't make it easy
>to automatically match up records. Often the best you can do is reduce
>certainty and increase the likelihood of multiple matches with other
>records. It doesn't hurt if you last name is Smith here in the U.S.A.

Hardly very effective, Mr. Rick Smith. You are not nearly so anonymous as
you seem to think. Your "Smith" disguise falls apart in a few cycles of a
Pentium.

(And bit rot is rarely effective...trust me. With XORs and comparisons,
even highly damaged records will be trivially reconstructable, with a
ruthless efficiency that will give capabilities 10 years from now that will
stun nearly everyone on this list. Deja News and Alta Vista on 10 years of
steroids, located offshore to enable regulatory arbitrage.)

To illustrate, let me call up my BlackNet Dossier Service entry on you.
www.black.net... I'll just pick _part_ of your entry, from exactly 30 years
ago:

[,,,,much stuff about Mr. Smith elided....]

....1966-67, student, Langley H.S., Langley, VA...interest in "Cretaceous
extinction" [Agency note: this interest in "extinction"...is it abnormal,
or just precocious?]...known to associate during this year with
troublemakers, incl. J. Landua, W. Winkowski, and [deleted for security
reasons by ONI]...

...

So, Mr. Smith...is the dossier entry basically correct? Were you in fact
living near Langley? Why? Is it true that your high school was on the other
side of the fence from the CIA?

Nationally enquiring minds want to know.

--Tim May

"The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM
that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology."
[NYT, 1996-10-02]
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."