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procedures for exporting temporarily a cellular phone with built-in encryption that he wanted to use to communicate with his head office back home. His eventual conclusion: "Anyone who is aware of and who tries to follow the regulations is made to jump through pointless hoops that are so obscure that even the people charged with enforcing don't know quite what to make of them."[18]

What becomes obvious as you study the massive amounts of material available on the Net on this subject is just how radically the science of cryptography and its uses are changing, and how slowly the government and law enforcement areas are adapting to the new encrypted order. For privacy advocates, these new developments in encryption offer as big a chance to create a new world order as the Net itself: they represent a chance to claw back a large chunk of the privacy that has been lost over the years of increasing computerization since the 1950s. Technology today can track you everywhere you go; but encryption could cover your tracks, giving each site or agency you interact with only the single piece of information it needs to know.

Cypherpunks and promoters of electronic cash such as David Chaum, the American former technical director of Digicash, talk of systems where the amount of information any one official can get about you is limited.[19] Given a smart card using the right sort of encryption, a police officer stopping you by the roadside might be limited to checking that your license was valid, rather than being handed by default your name and address. Similarly, a doctor might be limited to retrieving your medical records and the validity of your insurance (but not your social security number), and the social security people might be limited to checking your eligibility for benefits. Limiting departments' and officials' access to more than a small subset of your personal information might go a long way toward preventing a future that until recently seemed inevitable, in which so many marketing and governmental databases were linked and cross-referenced that a complete dossier on each of our lives would be readily available. Similar coding might make it possible to screen correspondents for a variety of personal characteristics; the many women-only online forums is just one example of a group who might want to take advantage of such technology.

Encryption is also the key technology in creating electronic cash, since such systems won't work unless the digital "money" can't be counterfeited, falsified, or easily stolen.[20] Electronic cash is a necessary component of many of the grand plans for electronic commerce, because so many of those plans depend on the availability of a method of payment that will work even for tiny amounts. Visa and MasterCard aren't going to be thrilled by your running up hundreds of five-cent charges (for, say, reading individual articles or playing music files from Web sites) every month because their current transaction costs are much higher than that. Besides, credit cards leave an electronic trail in all those databases. With privacy in mind, Chaum designed a system that blinds the issuing bank to the serial numbers of the money you get and blinds the vendor to the identity of the purchaser. All the bank needs to know is that the digital money is properly issued and paid for; all the vendor needs to know is that the money accepted in payment for goods or services is valid. If the goods are in a form that can be delivered over the Net to an email address, possibly an anonymized one, the vendor doesn't even need a real-world street address for delivery. The bank doesn't need to know which serial numbers were spent where, as long as the transactions can be properly authenticated. After all, in the real world we use cash and it can't be traced. Why not on the Net?

Uses like these open up a whole new world of possibilities, and also a whole new world of threats to traditional government structures. It may seem unlikely now that you would buy services such as consultancy expertise or software development from someone whose name and credentials you haven't checked out personally, but someone may function on the Net in an anonymous--or, more correctly, a pseudonymous--form, and establish a reputation by consistently posting useful and accurate information or writing workable programs over a period of time. However, in which country would that consultant or programmer be taxed, and how would a national revenue service be able to verify his or her income? If the income is used only to purchase more intellectual property that can be transmitted across the Net, this might be difficult. The point where it becomes easy to follow the money is when it leaves the Net and is either translated into traditional bank account holdings or