RE: The Continued Attack on Cash (Was: "The Right of Anonymity"...)

["James O'Toole" <otoole@lcs.mit.edu>]

Tim, the "social pressure" I was referring to is the process through which the obstacles to privacy-protecting measures are created and enforced.  Examples include both government regulation, which derives part of its support from publicity connecting cash with money laundering with drugs and/or crime, as well as finality/liability rules within non-government financial consortiums, which may strongly encourage proof-of-identity.

Let's take your example of the Institute of Applied Ontology (IAO) corporate Amex card (Ax)... 

Even with no relevant government regulations, we may find that Ax's agreement with merchants requires Ax to at least either pay the merchant or reveal to the merchant all relevant information known to Ax about the cardholder.  The right contract terms between the merchant and Amex will be good for them, and may be good for most consumers, and could easily be sub-optimal for the subset of consumers who highly value privacy.  The impracticality of negotiating special terms with each merchant means that the best plan to get the privacy/anonymity you want may be to set up a card such that Amex will be willing to operate without knowing much about the cardholder.  I assume that's the intent of your IAO corporate Ax card.

What allocation of the liability for card usage do you expect among Amex, IAO, and the cardholder?  Amex will want the liability allocated to IAO and the cardholder, and if Amex does not possess traceable identity information on the cardholder, then Amex will want an enforceable promise to pay from IAO.  To get this, or even to get funds in advance from IAO, we will find that Amex ends up knowing a lot about the identity of IAO or one of its officers.  Pretty soon we'll run up against the problem of whether Tim May can configure a corporate in the U.S. to be operated by people who don't know who he is, and who can't find out who he is (when properly encouraged to cooperate by Ken Starr...).  With or without government regulation, the most reliable people you can hire to operate that corporation for you may only want to do so if they are given the opportunity to somehow "know" you.

I think you can probably use a bank in a privacy-enhancing-locale such as Switzerland as an effective intermediary in Amex card issuance, but if you really don't want the bank to know who you are, you'll probably need a corporate intermediary between you and the bank, with nominee officers.

The real trick is probably to structure the whole thing so that neither the bank nor the nominee officers have anything to lose, including their reputations.  As long as part of their reputation is that they don't act as front men for drug dealers and criminals, we may find that they keep trying to find out enough about who you are to satisfy themselves that you are a good guy.  That's the social pressure flexing its muscles.

>An interesting question about the Privacy Card product is whether the
>social pressure against it is strong enough to defeat its privacy whenever
>the product is well advertised.  In other words, will a privacy product
>survive in spite of its own publicity in our current environment, or can

Corporate cards are already widely accepted...most of you probably have a
card issued to you through your employing institution. I see no "social
pressure" to block usage of my Institute of Applied Ontology corporate AmEx
card.

The real roadblock is that government makes such privacy-protecting
measures either difficult or illegal.

--Tim May

The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."