"Throughout the 1980s, Chaum was torn between fear and hope. The Berkeley graduate looked like a cliché: gray beard, full mane of hair tied to a ponytail, and Birkenstocks. Chaum was concerned that “automation of the way we pay for goods and services” was advancing in large strides. He shuddered at the prospect of somebody else connecting the dots of his life. Chaum knew that an irritatingly detailed picture could be pieced together from hotel bookings, transportation, restaurant visits, movie rentals, theater visits, lectures, dues, and purchases of food, pharmaceuticals, alcohol, books, news, religious and political material. “Computerization,” he lamented in 1985, “is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used.”
Individuals in both the private and public sectors would routinely exchange such personal information about consumers and citizens. The individual user, Chaum was concerned, would lose control and visibility; there was no way to tell whether the information collected in bulk was accurate, obsolete, or inappropriate. “The foundation is being laid for a dossier society, in which computers could be used to infer individuals’ life-styles, habits, whereabouts, and associations from data collected in ordinary consumer transactions.” Such an outcome, Chaum suspected, would be unacceptable to many.
Thankfully, public-key encryption had emerged just in time to save privacy from automation, computerization, and data-hungry corporations and governments. So Chaum started working on concrete solutions: untraceable electronic mail, digital pseudonyms, anonymous credentials, and general protection of privacy. Chaum is best known for yet another revolutionary cryptographic discovery: blind signatures.
[..] If crypto cash would not be adopted widely, Chaum feared, “invisible mass surveillance” would be inevitable, “perhaps irreversible.”"
http://passcode.csmonitor.com/cypherpun
@madars, wink wink
Kaapeec Turcijas apveersums neizdevaas, principaa. Teorija:
http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRec
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