Re: Creating privacy crises: Society hacking

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

(Sorry for just responding now....Netcom is grossly overloaded and is
rejecting mail, causing half-day or more delays in mail getting through.)

Bill Stewart writes:

> > At the HOPE conference, there was someone selling CD-ROMs of the DMV
> >  records for Oregon for $125.  The same folks promise to add more states
> >  soon: next in line is Texas.
> > Perhaps one could generate a privacy crisis by collecting that information
> >  and conducting a mass mailing to every person in the database: "we have
> >  this information on you.  So could anybody with $125.  Call your congress
> >  critter and complain."
> 
> Mailing that information to everybody in Oregon would be expensive.
> On the other hand, mailing it to everyone in the Oregon legislature,
> the governor, the DMV honchos, and maybe a few other high honchos
> could be interesting, and might not cost that much.....

My expectation is that, true to form, such a move would result in the
outlawing of the possession of this information by "unauthorized"
persons or groups. Authorized persons and groups, including all the
usual suspects, would of course then have even more freedom and less
scrutiny. The standard Band-Aid.

In any case, it doesn't tackle the real problem, which is that
transactions are not as "local" as they once were. These days,
permissions have to be gotten, SS numbers provided, health records
blipped back and forth over the I-way, etc. Any systems which require
more and more dossiers to be kept and cross-linked will erode liberty
and strengthen the power of governments.

Scaring the Congressrodents into making the U.S. have the equivalent
of the Data Privacy laws of the Europeans is *not* a victory.


--Tim May


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