[freehaven-dev] Simson Garfinkle & freehaven

[dmolnar <dmolnar@hcs.harvard.edu>]

Hi guys, 

I went to the seminar on the book "Database Nation" yesterday morning. 
The discussion was lively. Especially considering that
the author's main point was that technical solutions are *not* always
sufficient, and legal means are both sufficient and necessary to protect
privacy. 

It turns out that the author, Simson Garfinkle, is now writing an article
on data havens. He does not know very much about them yet; while he
may have heard of Eternity, he doesn't know about the cypherspace.org
site, or Freenet, or the Czech implementation. 

He'd like to talk to us. Rivest suggested inviting him to our Sunday
meeting. I'm going to e-mail him (simsong@mit.edu) with the meeting time,
Roger's agenda, and the location. Regardless of whether this is a good
idea or not, I already told him the meeting time and location, so he may
show up anyway.

He may be interested in the moral issues surrounding data havens. I
could see questions like "So what do you do when the credit bureaus use
freehaven to store their databases and therefore evade laws about
large collections of data?" Good thing that's already on the agenda!

Thanks, 
-David