Cryptography and democracy are clearly related to each other when we talk about teledemocracy. Many answers of civilians to certain state institutions can already be posed on the Internet. Many bureaucratic duties can be fulfilled through the Internet as well. But on February 8th 2000 the worldwide first elections on the Internet were performed. The elections themselves were nothing important, students' elections at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. But the project, called i-vote, with a preparation time of 10 months, wrote history. For a correct result, there existed several different encryption processes at the same time, like the digital signature, a blinding for anonymizing the vote and a virtual election paper that had to be encrypted as well, as simple e-mails could have been traced back.
The question whether teledemocracy can provide us with a more intensive democracy has to be answered within a different field of questions; here the question is rather about the role of cryptography in this area. The use of cryptography in teledemocracy is inevitable, but does it also re-influence cryptography? Or will it influence the different governments' laws again?
The sentence "We are committed to protecting the privacy of your personal information" that can be read as the introduction-sentence at the Free-PC-homepage (
But still we find ourselves overruled by the issue that someone believes to know what is good for us. And our privacy is floating away ...
Human Rights call for the right for privacy. We can go on fighting for privacy but anonymity has disappeared long ago. If we leave cookies and other data by visiting websites, we might be anything but surely not anonymous.
for more information about privacy and Human Rights see:
for re-anonymizing see:
"The fight for privacy today will always include the fight for unrestricted access to cryptography tools, for at least getting a slight chance that the buying of a book or any other small thing turns into a chain of messages for someone else's purpose, whether it might be governmental or commercial." (Cypherpunk's Manifesto)
for more information on the Cypherpunk's Manifesto see:
This year again many conferences on the topic of cryptography take place. For further information see:
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The public relations industry, the same as advertising, is concentrated in the hands of few dominant firms. Still, the striking element about corporate public relations is that PR firms are tightly related to advertising companies. Nine out of the ten biggest international PR agencies have close ties with the advertising industry. Also, looking at the largest acquisitions involving U.S. PR firms from 1997 to 1999 it is apparent that money coming from advertising agencies has played an important role.
Table: Top 10 PR Firms 1998
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With many PR agencies sold to advertising companies, the advertising industry's influence further increases; enabling them to offer their clients not only advertising services, but also know-how in marketing, public opinion, crisis and issues management and political lobbying.
Table: Acquisition of PR Agencies (1997 - 1999)
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Source: Odwyerpr.com.
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Visa International's over 21,000 member financial institutions have made VISA one of the world's leading full-service payment network. Visa's products and services include Visa Classic card, Visa Gold card, Visa debit cards, Visa commercial cards and the Visa Global ATM Network. VISA operates in 300 countries and territories and also provides a large consumer payments processing system.
Founded in 1851 in London, Reuters is the world's largest news and television agency with 1,946 journalists, photographers and camera operators in 183 bureaus serving newspapers, other news agencies, and radio and television broadcasters in 157 countries.
In addition to its traditional news-agency business, over its network Reuters provides financial information and a wide array of electronic trading and brokering services to banks, brokering houses, companies, governments, and individuals worldwide.
http://www.reuters.com