I was concerned about some of the effects electronic cash could have on criminal activity. It could make it very easy for people to undertake kidnappings and extortion. It might be possible for a person to do a kidnapping and ask for money to be exchanged in a way in which there was no physical exchange – you would have no idea what country the person was in. There was also the potential that new types of criminal activity would emerge.
Predictor: Brickell, Ernie
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine on e-cash, Steven Levy quotes Ernie Brickell, a Sandia Labs cryptographer. Levy writes: ”Researchers at Sandia Labs have been working on a scheme that attempts to balance anonymity with law enforcement’s need to trace criminal transactions. Sort of an anonymous, digital-cash Clipper Chip. ‘I was concerned about some of the effects electronic cash could have on criminal activity,’ says Ernie Brickell, a Sandia cryptographer. ‘It could make it very easy for people to undertake kidnappings and extortion. It might be possible for a person to do a kidnapping and ask for money to be exchanged in a way in which there was no physical exchange – you would have no idea what country the person was in. There was also the potential that new types of criminal activity would emerge. So we looked at whether it would be possible to develop electronic cash schemes in which people could have much of the privacy that Chaum talks about, but with hooks in it, so that if law enforcement had the need to look into a transaction, it could.’ Yet it is not at all clear that even this sort of limited anonymity will gain, er, currency. Users of electronic cash – the general public – will probably never be polled on whether they prefer it to be anonymous. Brickell admits that anonymity will be a hard sell. ‘There’s going to be so much information about individuals floating around, that we want to protect privacy as much as we can,’ he says. ‘But some of the bankers feel that an anonymous system is never going to make it, or even be something that they can get behind.'”
Date of prediction: December 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: E-cash
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: E-Money (That’s What I Want)
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.12/emoney_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney