Re: Bad ideas from Microsoft et al

From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Apr 07 2003 - 23:09:26 MDT

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    --- Steve Davies <steve365@btinternet.com> wrote:
    > Just found out about the link below. This certainly hasn't been
    > getting publicity over here.
    >
    > http://www.againsttcpa.com/tcpa-faq-en.html
    >
    > How serious is this?

    It is serious, but the authors against tcpa don't seem to have the
    imagination to think up beneficial uses of it. For example, if a
    government document management system is entirely tcpa compliant, it
    will be VERY easy to do government-wide FOIA requests, such that, even
    if you may not get every document due to classifications, you will know
    how many such documents exist.

    To demonstrate: lets say I submit a FOIA request for all documents on
    UFOs in government archives. I can determine, for example, that while
    the USAF might have several hundred thousand documents on them, which
    you'd expect for a department that had defending our skies as its job,
    if, say, the Department of the Interior had a billion documents on the
    same topic, I'd see that as rather odd and deserving of greater
    investigation.

    A tcpa compliant system would not be able to conveniently 'lose'
    documents, as has happened so much in the past. They might not give you
    access to them, or access to unredacted versions, but you should be
    able to know that they exist.

    While my example is somewhat mirthful, there are plenty of rather
    serious and useful applications of the principle.

    =====
    Mike Lorrey
    "Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
                                                         - Gen. John Stark
    "Pacifists are Objectively Pro-Fascist." - George Orwell
    "Treason doth never Prosper. What is the Reason?
    For if it Prosper, none Dare call it Treason..." - Ovid

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