Anguilla - A DataHaven?

Tim:
> Rather, there is an "archetype," if you will, of what a "remailer" is, what
> a "data haven" is, what a "tax shelter" is, etc. While we cannot reasonably
> expect a remailer to exactly match the archetype, we can point out obvious
> deficiencies.

1)  Anguilla has secrecy laws.  Professional relationships are confidential.
    There are strong secrecy laws.  I have not given out taxbomber's
    name, nor will I as I could face legal action if I did.

2)  Anguilla has no sales or income taxes.  A business does not need to
    report anything about income, sales, etc, to the government (or anyone
    else).  If a guy wants to sell his data and keep 100% of the profits
    instead of 50% or 60%, then Anguilla would be a haven for him.

3)  We don't have the same laws as other countries, so there are things
    that can be done here.  For example, we can export encryption 
    software.  Also, we will have bingo.com in Anguilla.

There are deficiencies from a cypherpunk or Libertarian point of view. And
these are interesting.  And exactly what I want to do is changing. As I
said, Anguilla is not the datahaven of cypherpunks wet dreams.  I am sure
there are no datahavens that match the cypherpunk concept of an ideal
datahaven, yet. 

But I think the term DataHaven applies as well to Anguilla as any other
place I know of.  

Tim, we would all be very happy if you were to locate a country that could
be the site of the ideal datahaven, and finance a couple cypherpunks to
setup there.  It would be a big help to our cause.  Could you do this? 

In the mean time, people may have to exist in cyberspace (like
www.taxbomber.com) without having a totally secure physical location. 
This is not the end of the world, or really even that painful.  If done
right you could be down for only an hour - just long enough for
nameservers to change.  Taxbomber is now setup to do it very fast next
time, if the need ever comes.  Tim, I think you have even advocated this
approach, not stressing the physical location, just the cyberspace
location.  No? 

   --  Vince

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Vincent Cate   vince@offshore.com.ai  http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince/
Offshore Information Services         http://www.offshore.com.ai/

On Wed, 14 Aug 1996, Vincent Cate wrote:

> 
> Tim:
> > Rather, there is an "archetype," if you will, of what a "remailer" is, what
> > a "data haven" is, what a "tax shelter" is, etc. While we cannot reasonably
> > expect a remailer to exactly match the archetype, we can point out obvious
> > deficiencies.
> 
> 1)  Anguilla has secrecy laws.  Professional relationships are confidential.
>     There are strong secrecy laws.  I have not given out taxbomber's
>     name, nor will I as I could face legal action if I did.
> 
> 2)  Anguilla has no sales or income taxes.  A business does not need to
>     report anything about income, sales, etc, to the government (or anyone
>     else).  If a guy wants to sell his data and keep 100% of the profits
>     instead of 50% or 60%, then Anguilla would be a haven for him.
> 
> 3)  We don't have the same laws as other countries, so there are things
>     that can be done here.  For example, we can export encryption 
>     software.  Also, we will have bingo.com in Anguilla.
> 
> There are deficiencies from a cypherpunk or Libertarian point of view. And
> these are interesting.  And exactly what I want to do is changing. As I
> said, Anguilla is not the datahaven of cypherpunks wet dreams.  I am sure
> there are no datahavens that match the cypherpunk concept of an ideal
> datahaven, yet. 
> 
> But I think the term DataHaven applies as well to Anguilla as any other
> place I know of.  
> 
> Tim, we would all be very happy if you were to locate a country that could
> be the site of the ideal datahaven, and finance a couple cypherpunks to
> setup there.  It would be a big help to our cause.  Could you do this? 

In the way that you suggest, I would argue it is not possible.  You cannot
ever have a "DataHaven" in a single jurisdiction.  As Mr. Cate notes,
there is no jurisdiction that will fit the bill, nor do I ever expect
that one will be created.

> In the mean time, people may have to exist in cyberspace (like
> www.taxbomber.com) without having a totally secure physical location. 

The trick is to get the ISP to exist in cyberspace, or ever will it be
subject to the whim of the local authority.

This is a key and very important distinction.

> This is not the end of the world, or really even that painful.  If done
> right you could be down for only an hour - just long enough for
> nameservers to change.  Taxbomber is now setup to do it very fast next
> time, if the need ever comes.  Tim, I think you have even advocated this
> approach, not stressing the physical location, just the cyberspace
> location.  No? 

I have advocated the approach, but as applied to service providers, not
users of service providers.

>    --  Vince
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Vincent Cate   vince@offshore.com.ai  http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince/
> Offshore Information Services         http://www.offshore.com.ai/
> 
> 

--
I hate lightning - finger for public key - Vote Monarchist
unicorn@schloss.li

Black Unicorn:
> The trick is to get the ISP to exist in cyberspace, or ever will it be
> subject to the whim of the local authority.
> 
> This is a key and very important distinction.

I agree.   I think this would be a good focus for cypherpunks to think
about for awhile.  So let me try to start something.

A first step is just having a domain name (foo.com) that you can move to
different virtual hosts.  This is still vulnerable at either the Internic
or at your nameservers.  Could also be a subdomain of some provider (say
foo.c2.org), but then c2.org gets the pressure. So far I don't know of
reporters going after the Internic for allowing a name (like foo.com).  So
this could be safe for awhile.  But it is not totally secure. 

A better method would be to make our own cypherpunk top level domain (I
think Sameer talked about this some time back).  With this people would
either have to setup their nameserver to use one of the cypherpunk
nameservers or get the IP address from some other method (a web page,
ftpable file, newsgroup, searching AltaVista, or a web page with a cgi
script to do the lookup on a machine).  But with this there would be no
easy way to cut off a name, and the ISP could always relocate if their
physical location were cut off (i.e. the IP address had to change). 

Then it is just an issue of coordinating this top level domain.  Say a
public key for each new subdomain and updates are done by sending a pgp
signed message to each of the servers.  With this type of design you could
have hundreds or thousands of servers that each were updated
independently.  To shut it down would take shutting down a lot of
nameservers. 

What do people think?  

   --  Vince

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Vincent Cate   vince@offshore.com.ai  http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince/
Offshore Information Services         http://www.offshore.com.ai/