Identification and Privacy are not Antinomies

[Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>]

Aaww horseplops[1]! In fact, great, festering, mid-path, sole-sticking
horseplops!  This argument is vacuous. As every small child knows, 
authentication != identification and, in most cases,  only authentication 
is required and, the absence of identification implies privacy.

Am I a UK citizen, a good credit risk, a club member in good
standing, etc.  An appropriate mechanism, a smartcard, can easily 
authenticate both itself (challenge-response) and the bearer via a biometric 
and/or PIN without revealing the identity of the holder.

However, who holds out hope that such a sensible
thing would ever be adopted by the powers-that-be.

Nematode

[1] The plop is a useful measure of human cogitation. As every small child
knows, much good thinking is done whilst enthroned on the commode, since 
the evacuation of feces from the anus promotes the introduction of fresh 
material into the brain through the ears.  After years of experimentation
and careful measurement, we (the ISO labs) have observed a strong  correlation
between ideas and fecal bombardment of the receptive commodal pool and audible
emissions therefrom. For example, it required only 0.3 plops to decide to vote
for Clinton while a similar decision in favor of John Major required almost 5 plops.
For the purposes of comparison, 10^6 homosapiens plop = 1 horseplop. While the
relationship between megaplops, flops and MIPS is not yet clear, our
ISO plop standard should be emitted soon.

-----BEGIN PLOP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PLOP for Personal Privacy
Charset: nocommode

NSACIAMOUSEaw6mkJhRWnHTzAQFMlgP/ZMM+14qUzy+w6AGSlOtAyrE2BBDSV3Hm
Tlc0Ct7wyXV2CPEMzieCm4ZS0rzigkgTZTMCmEqYexEJkdSAU60WMHm3cr28UJIG
ekx7N7aWKQ34u05dRrE+IVR329y0ia/2F8B7edZ7CqoydOJAnQxNIB1qohlCGlGT
RYgOGVSpO04=
=MF1K
-----END PLOP SIGNATURE-----