Re: Extortion Explosion

[George A. Gleason <gg@well.sf.ca.us>]

Polyanna's item about crypto-anonymity protecting informants and background
sources is most interesting.  DEspite my dislike of spying, this idea sounds
pretty decent.  No invasions of privacy or civil rights are necessarily
involved; infiltration is somehow not quite as awful as the spectre of mass
surveillance (if nothing else it's labor intensive, which limits its use to
substantial cases).  And it might just get a lot of results.  Might also
lead to a lot of whistle-blowing on white collar baddies like the S&L
fraudsters.  Hey, long before Michael Milliken's name was in the media, I
heard about his little fraud scheme from a fellow telecom technician who
worked on the PBX in his office and got a whole lot first-hand from casual
chat overheard in the office.  Consider all the secretaries who know their
bosses are cheating, ripping off, and all that.  (Consider them dead if
their crooked bosses ever go through the hard discs and find fragments of
cleartext or even ciphertext hanging about: we need to educate the public on
crypto protocol so people don't make dumb errors that may cost them dearly!)

-gg