, 18 tweets, 6 min read Read on Twitter
On the agenda for next week's Wyoming Legislative Blockchain Task Force is the topic of prohibiting being being compelled to produce a private key. You can still be compelled by courts to transfer a digital asset or prove control of an asset using a public key. #KeysAreNotAssets
There is some prior discussion on this topic starting with my original thread on twitter:
And and further discussions in this thread after the last Blockchain Task Force meeting:
This is an important first step in a critical issue for the future of our society. Our personal freedoms and civil rights have been about our physical bodies, but increasingly our "selves" reach into the digital world, where these rights have become defined as alienable property.
Also, our freedom & rights in our physical selves are increasingly becoming entwined with our digital world, resulting in a risk that our inalienable rights become alienable property. Examples are Uber worker abuses, as well as threats of biometrics, brain/behavior scans, etc.
Under US 5th Amendment & the UN Declaration of Human I have rights to freedom of thought and conscience in my human body. However, increasingly portions of my memory & mind are delegated to digital devices like my phone, which are alienable property that can be taken from me.
Where the intersection of our physical selves and our digital selves reside is in our mental secrets, which in current technology is manifested in private keys. These secrets are not safe to share or transfer, and we don't have good ways to do so. So they should be protected.
Ultimately we should to go beyond even this proposed legislation. @JasonCoombsCEO suggest that Wyoming should consider even stronger statement, a "Wyoming Key Privacy Act" along with objective "bright-line rule" protecting our personal and digital self-sovereignty.
@JasonCoombsCEO Jason suggests "first establish the absolute right of the private key holder to employ any technology or method they wish to use to keep their private keys private"
@JasonCoombsCEO Jason continues "The statute should create a bright line safe harbor, one which preempts any other statute or lawful order that might issue from any court or authority, which is an affirmative defense against prosecution or civil liability of any kind for anyone's refusal to…"
@JasonCoombsCEO "…to reveal their private keys to anyone else under any circumstances, including if any court order from any jurisdiction seeks to compel production."
@JasonCoombsCEO "Everyone has a natural right to be secure in the contents of our most private and most important inner state of being…"
@JasonCoombsCEO "…No law should be enacted which empowers government to extract from our minds and memories the private keys that potentially represent our relationships, our personal records and our assets."
@JasonCoombsCEO There is some justification in this approach given the recent US Supreme Court case about cell phone searches. Justice Alito says "we should not mechanically apply the rule used in the predigital era to the search of a cell phone…"
@JasonCoombsCEO Justice Alioto continues "…Many cell phones now in use are capable of storing and accessing a quantity of information, some highly personal, that no person would ever have had on his person in hard-copy form."
@JasonCoombsCEO This discussion about protecting private keys & rights will continue next Friday morning at 11am in the public meeting of the Wyoming Blockchain Task Force. If will be there I hope that you'll join me in offering your support of these initiatives.
@JasonCoombsCEO I also encourage organizations like @EFF, the @ACLU and others to consider putting protection of privacy keys as a civil rights issue on their agenda, and participate in these discussions.
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