December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: FBI to inaugurate national DNA database
by Ernest Hua 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

I think it would be a very bad idea for civil liberties groups to come out 100% against this. So far all they have said is that they intend to log all convicted criminals. If the C.L. groups complain about that, then it would be too easy for the FBI to turn around and say, "Geez! These guys complain about anything and everything we do!" It would serve the civil liberties causes (and in particular, the crypto cause) much better to view this with suspicion and caution and strongly point out that, while this, on its face, looks okay, the FBI have had a perfect record of always pushing for more surveillence and more record tracking than they previously promise to hold to. Secondly, it is much more important to focus law makers on the FBI's "constantly pushing for everything they can get away with while talking BALANCE" behavior than to nickle and dime every law favoring the FBI. They must be shown for their blatant lies rather than for their gray area behavior. Otherwise, it's a very very tough battle. Ern -----Original Message----- From: Jim Gillogly <jim(a)acm.org> To: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net <cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net> Date: Monday, October 12, 1998 9:31 AM Subject: FBI to inaugurate national DNA database > >SJMC retails a report from today's NYT: > >http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/084314.htm > >Executive summary: > >- Computer at secret location >- Access limited to LE >- All sex offenders get to contribute; felons in some States; > other contributors not yet determined. > >-- > Jim Gillogly > Highday, 21 Winterfilth S.R. 1998, 16:12 > 12.19.5.10.14, 5 Ix 7 Yax, Seventh Lord of Night >

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FYI: More on WebTV security
by Robert Hettinga 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text From: Pablo Calamera <pablo(a)microsoft.com> To: "'mac-crypto(a)vmeng.com'" <mac-crypto(a)vmeng.com> Subject: FYI: More on WebTV security Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 16:34:14 -0700 Sender: <mac-crypto(a)vmeng.com> Precedence: Bulk Don't know if you've seen this, but we were recently granted a license to ship 128-bit RC4 in our product. No key recovery, no key escrow. Here's the fluff: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1998/Oct98/EncryptionPR.htm --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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by randrent 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

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RE:
by Anonymous 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

paranoid, or enlightened? :) At 03:55 PM 10/10/98 , you wrote: >~> PS. there is someone on this list who knows who >~> i am. yes there is someone who knows who anon >~> posters are. we fucking hate you and am waiting >~> for you to take the trap and we will reveal your >~> identity scumbag. >

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Re:
by Secret Squirrel 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Anonymous wrote: > > > >HOW MUCH CODE DID 'CYPHERPUNK' TIM MAY EVER WRITE? > > > > How much code have you ever written? > > A DECENT AMOUNT. THE CRYPTO APPS I CREATED ARE SOMEWHAT UNIQUE, > SO IF I MENTIONED THEM YOU MIGHT FIGURE OUT WHO I AM. Did you rewrite your keyboard driver at the same time?

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18 Dec '03

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Between the Lines
by Edwin E. Smith 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Between the Lines Joseph Farah Disarm the BATF Another day, another debacle for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. This time, the scene is not Waco, Texas, or Ruby Ridge, Idaho, but Taft, California -- another hotbed of "anti-government activity." According to the federal government's own account, the BATF began an investigation into illegal firearms sales by people espousing anti-government rhetoric three or four years ago with an undercover agent allegedly making an illegal purchase of a .22-caliber pistol. It ended last week with one of the three targets of the federal government probe dead in a highly unusual -- and, yes, improbable -- incident. The official story goes something like this: Two BATF agents, a Kern County sheriff's deputy and Sgt. Ed Whiting of the Taft Police Department attempted to take into custody on illegal firearms trafficking charges, Darryl Howell, a 45-year-old grandfather and owner of a surplus store that sold, among other things, guns and ammunition. A struggle between the BATF agents and Howell ensued. The cops say he broke away from them, lunged for a .45-caliber handgun, put it into his mouth and fired a single shot. Whiting, the story goes, had become temporarily distracted during the scuffle. When he heard the single shot, he instinctively aimed his gun at Howell and fired three more shots into his already, presumably, lifeless body. Now, if you believe that, I have an intercontinental ballistic missile I'd like to sell you. I'm not a cop, and I've never played one on TV. But I have reported on enough crime stories in my day to know when one stinks to high heaven. And this one smells like a cattle ranch on a windless, summer day in California's Central Valley. Let me see if I have this straight. Four cops, one "suspect." This wanted outlaw -- so dangerous he's been under scrutiny of federal law enforcement for nearly four years -- is confronted not in his home, not on his lunch break, not on his way to work or after he locks up, but during the workday in a store loaded with firearms. Even though he's not accused of being on PCP or any other drugs, he cannot be physically subdued by four officers. They are unable to persuade him to come along peacefully or handcuff him involuntarily. Instead, he is permitted by these highly trained law enforcement professionals to grab one of his guns. But they don't shoot him right away. Oh no. They allow him to pick up the handgun, bring it all the way up to his mouth and pull the trigger. Only then, we are told, does one of the officers, who wasn't paying attention, pump the desperado full of lead. Do these BATF clowns ever learn? Either these guys are Washington's answer to the Keystone Kops, or we have on the loose a cold, calculating, professional, Gestapo-like killing machine designed to root out dissidents exercising their Second Amendment rights and blow them away without the messiness of trials and due process. How many times does America need to see such tragedies before it wakes up and disarms these dangerous, out-of-control, gun-slinging hitmen? The inmates are running the asylum, folks. Beam me up. There is no allegation made by any of these cowboys that Howell or any others charged in a series of raids in the town of Taft last week had provided weapons to criminals or represented a threat to law-abiding citizens anywhere. In fact, I personally would have felt a lot safer in Taft last week, before Mr. Howell was "suicided" than I would today. I think most Americans would. Let's suspend our own cognitive skills and good judgment for a moment and pretend the cops' story is 100 percent accurate. Was the four-year investigation worth it? Was it a prudent investment of taxpayer dollars? Why aren't these law-enforcement heroes out investigating real crimes of violence against innocent victims, instead of conducting secretive sting operations designed to entrap people into violating inherently unconstitutional laws? But, you know what? Such talk can get you in trouble these days. One of the BATF agents responsible for this tragedy said one of Howell's friends had (gasp!) complained about a ban on "assault weapons" and the actions of President Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. At the risk of inviting a similar assault on my home or business, let me pick up that cry: These are, indeed, some of the people who represent a real threat to our lives and liberty in America t

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RE: FBI to inaugurate national DNA database
by Brown, R Ken 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

> Ernest Hua[SMTP:hua@teralogic-inc.com] wrote: > > I think it would be a very bad idea for civil liberties > groups to come out 100% against this. So far all they > have said is that they intend to log all convicted criminals. > If the C.L. groups complain about that, then it would be too > easy for the FBI to turn around and say, "Geez! These guys > complain about anything and everything we do!" I think you are falling for the old bazaar bargaining trick. The guy wants to sell you a carpet that is worth a shekel. He reckons he can do you for ten shekels. So he starts the bidding at a hundred and you think you've done well when you've beaten him down to fifteen. America is - cypherpunks tell me - a country where people worry about their social security number being kept on databases, where caller id on phones can be a hot political issue. This DNA business is far more intrusive and dangerous than any of that. Don't fall for it! Don't fall for the argument that it is only the bad guys who get tagged. They can define anyone they want as a bad guy. How many people do you know who have never done anything for which they could be convicted as a criminal? Never driven a car faster then the speed limit, never smoked dope, never ridden a bicycle on the pavement, never been drunk in a public place? To a large extent the set of "convicted criminals" is governed by police or court decisions rather than by the actions of the criminals. Over here in Britain we've had a long succession of intrusive, abusive laws promulgated in the name of public safety, law and order, peace on the streets. The previous government had their absurd "dangerous dogs act" which became a laughing stock before the ink was dry then their horrendous and evil "Criminal Justice Bill" with racist provisions allowing the police to persecute travellers and uttely useless laws against "music with repetitive beats" not to mention new rules to control "young offenders, bailed persons, squatters, travellers, ravers, protesters, trespassers, arrested persons, defendants, hunt-saboteurs, pornographers, video pirates, obscene telephone-callers, prisoners, racists, terrorists, ticket touts, cannabis-smokers, serious fraudsters and not forgetting gay men under 18." The current lot aren't as bad, and are certainly more well-intentioned but they haven't repealed any of the earlier stuff and are, bit by bit, filling in the few gaps in the wall of regulation and legislation the Tories built around anyone who wasn't a middle-aged white man who worked 9 to 5, living in a suburb with a car and a mortgage, who never went out. Our current Home Secretary (cabinet minister with responsibility for police anong other things) was probably the first person in such a position in any major country who was brought up by a single mother on a violent estate (what you'd call a housing project in America) and he thinks he knows - no he *does* know - what most ordinary people in environments like that want from life. So he proposes law after law to make things better, to tell people how they ought to live, all with the best of intentions. Curfews for children (you ask questions and he will just come back at you and say "do you *really* think 9-year-old children should be wandering around on their own at night, or in gangs?" to which the honest answer is "no, but it's none of your business if they do"). Compulsory parenting education for parents whose children commit crimes. A national register of paedophiles - which is made public, so a couple of convicted child abusers, on being released from jail asked to be taken back in again because their life wasn't safe outside. Defining email that goes outside the country as "export" so that writing about bombs (or cryptography?) can come under the strategic arms export regulations. And so on. And all the while local councils put up cameras in every high street... And all the [...snip...] > Secondly, it is much more important to focus law makers > on the FBI's "constantly pushing for everything they can > get away with while talking BALANCE" behavior than to nickle > and dime every law favoring the FBI. They must be shown > for their blatant lies rather than for their gray area behavior. > Otherwise, it's a very very tough battle.

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BATF strike again
by Anonymous 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

CHRISTINE L. PETERSON Friends skeptical of official account October 8, 1998 http://www.bakersfield.com/top/i--1304241419.asp By CHRISTINE L. PETERSON Californian staff writer Disbelief permeated the tight-knit communities of Taft and Ford City Thursday as residents and friends of Darryl Howell questioned law enforcement's account of his death in his gun shop. The Kern County Sheriff Department's version of the events that the gun shop owner grabbed a loaded .45-caliber handgun Wednesday, struggled with officers and then placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger just didn't fit with what they knew of the father of two. Sheriff's officials said a Taft police officer, not knowing where the expended round went, immediately fired three rounds that struck Howell, 45, on the right side of his body. He died at the scene. "Everyone in Taft knows this is stupid," said Shannon Ong, 34, Howell's niece. "They think the police officers are trying to make it seem like he was a criminal." Ong believes there could be nothing further from the truth that the man who grew up in Taft and graduated from Taft Union High School where yearbooks say he played football and was in the band was a wonderful man who ran an upstanding business. While at least one family member and friends said Howell was vocal in support of gun rights, they did not believe he would condone any illegal behavior or sell illegal firearms. "The way that press release makes him sound, well, he just would have never done anything like that," Ong said after reading a copy of a sheriff's news release on the incident. ATF agents went to Alpha Omega Surplus and Supplies Store as part of a four-year firearms trafficking investigation, said ATF special agent Tracy Hite. She said ATF was assisted in serving a warrant by the Taft Police Department and Kern County Sheriff's Department. "This was a lengthy investigation that led us to several locations," Hite said, explaining that there were search warrants for five locations and arrest warrants for three people in Kern County. Ong estimated her uncle had the business for 15 to 20 years, first within Taft city limits and then in the county. At the business Thursday, some family members and friends gathered at the shop. A bumper sticker on a window bore the message: "Only tyrants and criminals fear honest armed citizens." Recorded programs blared from speakers outside the shop. "I just don't understand it," said friend Jamie Walchock. She said that while she didn't share Howell's support of guns, she respected him because he looked on the bright side of life, listened to and worked with people on their problems and was satisfied with making ends meet. She said Howell talked about moving. "In the 12 years I have known him, I have never seen him upset," Walchock said. To her, Howell was a law-abiding citizen; she said he didn't like helmets so he stopped riding his motorcycle when the helmet law went into effect. "I know in a million years he wouldn't ever shoot himself or lunge at a police officer," Walchock said. Ken Bishop, who would sometimes visit Howell at his shop, said Howell was "somewhat of a patriot" and would share his opinions about guns. He said that law enforcement's statement that Howell had illegal firearms seems "off the wall." Mike Hodges, the publisher of Golden Empire Review, said Howell asked to have a column printed in the paper titled, "Notes from Moron." Taft was called Moron in 1908, according to "Kern County Place Names." The city changed its name to Taft in 1909. In the column, Howell quotes several passages from the Bible. The column Hodges attributed to Howell states, "It is not an hone to be in the Militia! It is our God-given duty! We are commanded to be his soldiers. It is time to lay aside our daily' jobs and return to duty! R&R is over! To arms, to arms! Where are His soldiers? "Right now, where is your squad members? Right now can you honestly state that you are aware of their location and their ability to respond to duty?" Hodges said after Howell died, he reread the column. "It gave me an eerie, shaky feeling," Hodges said. He said he didn't believe Howell would ever resist arrest. While Howell didn't agree with some gun legislation, he abided by it, Hodges said. "I know Darryl wouldn't kill himself and he wouldn't hurt someone else," Hodges said. "My personal experience is he was a real giving person." 10/07/98 Article Man shot to death at Taft gun shop http://www.bakersfield.com/top/i--1304325052.asp

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TCR9 -- A Soldier of the Great War
by Robert Hettinga 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text From: CONSILRPT(a)aol.com Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 04:44:22 EDT To: "The Consilience Report" <consilience-report(a)lists.lyris.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Subject: TCR9 -- A Soldier of the Great War List-Subscribe: <mailto:subscribe-consilience-report@lists.lyris.net> List-Owner: <mailto:owner-consilience-report@lists.lyris.net> Reply-To: CONSILRPT(a)aol.com X-Message-Id: <bba934b5.362312e6(a)aol.com> Sender: bounce-consilience-report-262839(a)lists.lyris.net Precedence: bulk ____________________________________________________________ THE CONSILIENCE REPORT: A Bionomic Meditation Number Nine 10/13/98 _____________________________________________________________ A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR Last Waltz in Vienna ================ In the summer of 1918 the Great War was grinding through its fourth year. Thirty millions already dead or wounded -- or more -- no one really knows -- and the wreck of Europe still staggered on, like a blind man into oncoming traffic. In Italy the Austrian army was making its last futile bid for a military victory with an attack across the Piave River. In ten days they would lose 100,000 men -- twice all the American deaths in Vietnam, but barely a footnote in the endless slaughter of WW1. If you had been on the Italian front that June -- if you had been, say, young Ernest Hemingway from Michigan, tending your ambulance -- and had looked up at just the right time and place, you might have seen one of the biplanes of that era: an observation craft buzzing westward from the Austrian lines. The skinny boy-officer in the rear cockpit was a spotter for an artillery regiment of the Austro- Hungarian army. He had dropped out of high school in his senior year to enlist and experience a small part of the catastrophe. He was Lieutenant Friedrich August von Hayek, eldest son of a distinguished family of the minor Austrian nobility. He was just nineteen years old and, like all the young men so engaged that year, had no good prospect of getting much older. Hayek had been born in Vienna in 1899, in the reign of "der Alte Kaiser," the Emperor Franz- Joseph, next-to-last of the durable Habsburg dynasty. Unlike many of his age and class, Lt. von Hayek survived his war. He contracted malaria in the long retreat in the fall of 1918 but made it back -- thin and sick, but alive -- to a city that was no longer the glittering capital of a polyglot empire. Vienna was now just the largest city in the tiny rump state of the Austrian Republic -- redundant, impoverished, and on the edge of starvation. But it still possessed enough intellectual and cultural capital for one last burst of achievement before the Nazis rolled in fifteen years later. Here, Hayek considered his prospects in a changed world and prepared to enter the University of Vienna. A Shift of Attention =============== His first love had been the natural sciences. His grandfather had been a prominent ornithologist and Hayek, like his father, had been a fervent amateur botanist. One of his brothers became an anatomist, the other a chemist. By the time he was sixteen he had progressed from a collector's interest in taxonomy to paleontology and evolutionary theory -- but the war changed things. The experience of serving in a multinational army, shifted his interest from the natural to the social sciences. As he drily remarked: I served in a battle in which eleven different languages were spoken. It's bound to draw your attention to the problems of social organiization. As unbearable as 1914-1918 had been, events were already in motion to ensure that the rest of the horrible twentieth century arrived on schedule. Austria's senior ally -- the other Kaiser -- had just put the Russian emigre Vladimir Ulyanov (nom de guerre: Lenin) into a sealed train bound for St Petersburg, like a plague bacillus into the artery of a sick man. And within a year another Austrian veteran, Adolph Hitler, would make his way to Vienna, tramping through a rougher neighborhood than Hayek's, completing his own education among the crackpots and anti-semites that had long been flourishing like weeds in the brilliant but decadent capital. Europe, broken and bleeding, waited patiently while the scenery was shifted and the principal players learned their lines for the next act. Hayek had little to do with that -- few would be ready to listen to him or his ideas until the National Socialists and Communists had shot their bolt, and not many even then. Some Piety ========= We would like to think that everyone knows of, and esteems Hayek but, for the benefit of students arriving late here is a brief recitation: F. A. Hayek (1899-1992) was one of the foremost economists of this century before he morphed into a later and even more important career as a social and political philosopher. He won the Nobel prize in economics in 1974 and America's presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. Those are some of the bare facts as they are cited in reference books, but there is much more to be said: He was a mighty scholar, an original thinker, a gentleman in a nearly-forgotten sense of that word. Above all, he was a man of unflinching moral courage who did as much as anyone to keep the idea of individual freedom alive. In an age when many of our leaders have tried to tell us that liberty is an embarrassing relic of another age -- something that we should happily trade in for something shinier -- our nation, or our race, or equality, or security, or social justice, or some other fabulous chimera -- Hayek quietly, persistently said: No, we won't. For that, and for other things, we owe him. Hayek had a long and useful life, doing important work on into his 70s and 80s, but he won't quite have made it into his centenary year of 1999. We expect that hosannahs will be going up from all of the various libertarian enclaves as his 100th birth- day approaches, but TCR would like to be among the first to pay our respects. We expect we will need two or three more essays to talk about his life and work, connect it to our present concerns, and to try to make it clear that he is somewhat more than just another dead economist. There's something to be said for the old Greek ideal of piety -- civic reverence toward what has gone before -- and if anyone in our century deserves a bit of that, it is certainly he. London ====== Between the wars, even before the Nazis would have made his departure obligatory, Hayek left Vienna and alighted in London, a place he found very much to his liking. In 1895, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, doyen and doyenne of English socialism, had founded the London School of Economics and Political Science, intending for it to be the West Point of their sect. But things had loosened up a bit, and Lionel Robbins, the moderate scholar who headed the economics department, decided that a young visiting lecturer from Vienna was a comer. Robbins discovered that Hayek, notwithstanding his anti-socialist views, seemed to know more about the history of the English monetary system than any man in England. His English was passable and he was a genial, well-bred sort -- "clubbable" as the English say. Robbins offered young Dr Hayek a faculty position. LSE didn't have quite the cachet of Oxford or Cambridge but, for a young foreigner whose own country offered poor prospects, it was a plum. The Great Debate ============= In the small world that concerned itself with economic theory, Hayek emerged in the early Thirties as the great rival of John Maynard Keynes. In the journals, they conducted a public debate about monetary and fiscal policy and what, if anything, economists (and the governments they advised), could do about the Great Depression that seemed to be swallowing up the wealth of the planet. Keynes, brilliant and charismatic, had dabbled in several fields, but now believed he had solved the problem of booms and busts -- what the economists genteelly referred to as "economic fluctuations." When Keynes published his _Treatise on Money_, Hayek, uncharismatic but persistent, fired back with a series of penetrating criticisms. Later Keynes extended his ideas in_The General Theory of Employment, Credit, and Money_, and again Hayek returned fire. Personally, Keynes and Hayek became good friends, sharing a passion for history and book collecting. Publicly, they fought on. As we all know, Keynes won the debate and Hayek lost it, or so it seemed at the time, as governments gravitated to Keynesianism. Then came the Second War, which seemed to justify extension of government control over whatever bits of their economies that central planners in Washington and London had not already comandeered to fight the depression. We can't pause here to consider the substance of the Keynes-Hayek debate (and aren't compe- tent to do so), except perhaps to say that it was rooted in a basic conceptual clash about whether macroeconomics as proposed by Keynes and others really made any sense. Hayek (and the Austrian school from which he sprang) held that the aggregate measurements of economic activity -- which Keynes proposed to track and control through state action --were statistical illusions that could only mislead policy- makers about microeconomic reality. Later, Hayek himself said of the great debate: In the middle 1940s... I was known as one of the two main disputing economists: there was Keynes and there was I . Now Keynes died and became a saint; and I discredited myself by publishing _The Road to Serfdom ... A Discreditable Book ================ In the summer of 1939, even after Austria's annexation by Hitler, Hayek took train across Europe for his annual holiday in the Austrian Alps. He was a vigorous forty and an experienced mountaineer, confident that even if war befell, he could walk out of the country across the mountains, depending on his skills and knowledge to reach Switzerland. He did his best thinking in the mountains and here, perhaps, in Nazified Austria, he mapped out his own little piece of the next war. He had seen, at closer-hand than his English colleagues, the extinction of liberal Europe, the ascendency of barbarism, and the steps by which it had been wrought. He had already published a little article called "Freedom and the Economic System" in a popular magazine. It contained the germ for an argument he knew many people wouldn't want to hear. His loyalty was to England now, but he began to wonder if his new countrymen really understood how easily their liberty could slip through their fingers. An ex-enemy alien, with a German accent and a "von" in front of his name was not considered a suitable candidate for a government post -- it would have involved PR problems that Mr Churchill didn't need. So Robbins and Keynes became government advisors, while Hayek taught. His contribution to the war effort was philosophical and polemical rather than bureaucratic. And, as it turned out, the war that preoccupied his thougtsa wasn't precisely the same one that the English thought they were fighting. In his spare time between 1940 and 1943 he wrote _The Road to Serfdom_, and published it in Britain in 1944. It was a book that nearly ruined his reputation as an economist and set his life on a new course. On the Road ========= When Hayek was awarded the Nobel prize in 1974, the first reaction of many was surprise that he was still alive. A few recalled that he had debated Keynes many years ago, then he had published a polemic that upset everyone and wrecked his career. Where had he been? Unlike his friend and rival Keynes, Hayek didn't think of himself as a wit. When he dedicated RTS to "The Socialists of All Parties," he was not being arch or ironical. They were precisely the people he was addressing. If it was a polemic, it was an uncommonly polite one. In a long and disputatious life Hayek always carefully attributed only seemly motives to his opponents -- never suggesting that they sought anything but the good and the true. In his own case it may have been so, but he was a very unusual man. His opponents were often not so delicate. What he told them, in fine, was that he believed in their good intentions: There can be no doubt that most socialists still believe profoundly in the liberal ideal of freedom and that they would recoil if they became convinced that the realization of their program would mean the destruction of freedom. Then, for two hundred pages, he tried to so convince them and bring about that recoil. He argued that the planned economies to which so many well-meaning people had pinned their hopes for a better world would inevitably and tragically lead to a worse one. That all of their ideas had already been tried in Germany or Russia or both. That the results were there for anyone with the eyes to see them. That their good intentions would not save them. The book was written by an Austro-Englishman specifically to warn his new countrymen -- full of examples and arguments calculated to move an English mind. It received a respectful hearing there, where Hayek was something of a minor public figure. It never occurred to him that it would become a popular best-seller in the United States, where he was completely unknown. When Hayek arrived in the United States in the spring of 1945, he was planning to lecture to audiences of economists at a few universities. Instead, he discovered that RTS had been published not just by the scholarly University of Chicago Press, but had been condensed in The Readers' Digest, the largest-circulation magazine of its day, then re-printed in a cheap edition as a Book-of-the-Month. In the pre- television, pre-Internet world of 1945 it was a media blitz. He was astounded to discover that he was an instant celebrity. In New York, instead of lecturing to a few professors he found himself addressing an overflow crowd in a 3000-seat auditorium, and carried live on network radio. Aftermath ======== It would be pleasant to report that the socialists of all parties had actually been persuaded, or at least cowed, by RTS, but of course no such thing happened. Not then, and not now. Hayek had his bewildering few weeks of American celebrity, and here and there RTS penetrated deeply. Hayek continued to work and write, spent time in the United States and in liberated Europe, and did what he could to marshal a revival of what he quaintly still insisted on calling "liberalism." His American critics, calling themselves liberals, insisted that he was a reactionary conservative and an enemy of progress. A comedy of errors that persists to this day. Although Hayek and RTS outlived many critics -- always the most satisfactory way to win an argument -- there were plenty of them. One of the three American commercial publishers that rejected the book found it so politically repulsive that they reportedly said it was "unfit for publication by a reputable house." As he recalled it: The English socialists, with few exceptions, accepted the book as something written in good faith...In America it was wholly different... The great enthusiasm about the New Deal was still at its height...the American intelligentsia...felt that this was a betrayal of the highest ideals which intellectuals ought to defend. So I was exposed to incredible abuse... It went so far as to completely discredit me professionally. When efforts were made to bring Hayek to the University of Chicago a few years later, the school's economists rose in angry disdain. Hayek had to settle for a berth with the prestigious Committee on Social Thought, where he was pointedly not expected to profess economics. It was only in 1974 when he made his trip to Stockholm to receive his Nobel gong, that there was a general revival of interest in the forgotten man. And there the tale will have to rest for now. Postscript and Preview ================= At the Fourth Bionomics Conference in 1996, Eric B. Baum of the NEC Research Institute gave a workshop on genetic algorithms, featuring a program he called "The Hayek Machine." The name was not whimsical -- it pointed back to an obscure book by Hayek called _The Sensory Order_, a foray by the economist into theoretical psychology -- published in 1952, but based on notions he had sketched out in the 1920s. Genetic algorithms are a subset of artificial intelligence research, but they also have important implications for economics, psychology, biology, and other disciplines. Baum's Hayek1 and Hayek2 are "dumb" programs operating with limited infor- mation about their environment, but which manage to solve complex problems. It is Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, as enriched by F. A. Hayek and formalized by cutting-edge computer science. We think the value of history is self-evident, but our interest in Hayek is mainly forward-looking. He tried, very persuasively, to show us the social world as a field of self-organizing institutions co-evolving in an almost Darwinian fashion -- what he called spontaneous order. Hayek's work anticipated and partly inspired research now being carried out in many disciplines. It implies a world-view that is still inchoate and hard to encapsule in a word or a phrase. "Complex self-organizing systems" catches some of it. But it could just as well be called simply Hayekian. It also happens to be a way of looking at things that is congenial to libertarians. If the social world were not, in fact, essentially Hayekian, then order could never arise spontaneously. But our growing understanding of complex systems in many contexts is confirming the reasonings and intuitions of Hayek. Our human world is a place where order need not be imposed by planners and despots -- a world where a free society operating within an impersonal framework of basic rules is an available option. As intimated above, we hope to tease out various Hayekian insights in future TCRs: spontaneous organization, the role of information in the economy, and his re-thinking of the problem of constitutional govenment, among others. And along the way: an occasional nod of gratitude to the old soldier himself. ====================================== Resources: 1. A Soldier of the Great War Our title was swiped from the excellent novel of the same name by Mark Helprin. It is a fictional reminiscence of an old man who, in his youth, fought with the Italian Army in World War One. A convenient way to learn something about that war, which also happens to be a fine piece of writing. 2. Hayek had been born in Vienna... There are several biographical sketches of Hayek here and there, but no proper biography exists. For this essay we relied heavily on _Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue Edited by Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar_. It has been cobbled together from several tape- recorded interviews with Hayek in the 1970s and '80s, and gives us Hayek in his own words. It's a companion to the collected works of Hayek, being published in 20-odd volumes by University of Chicago Press with the support of a dozen classical liberal/libertarian groups in several countries, including Cato and the Reason Foundation. The introduction by Stephen Kresge is the best short summary of Hayek's life and works that we know of. The book includes some wonderful photos, including young FAH in the regalia of an Austrian officer, and writing al fresco in the Alps. All extended Hayek quotes arefrom this work. Available from Amazon (1994 HC edition) for $27.50: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0226320626/002-2884821-8302613 2a. The Hayek Interviews One of the tapes included in _Hayek on Hayek_ is a 1977 interview conducted by Prof. Tom Hazlett. It was printed in Reason magazine in 1992 following Hayek's death. Available at: http://www.reasonmag.com/hayekint.html Also, for those who want to see and hear the man himself, several recordings are available from the Idea Channel. Selected clips can be seen/heard for no charge at their website: http://www.ideachannel.com/HayekDiscussions.htm 3. The Hayek-Keynes Debate No short piece can resolve this tangled and very theoretical fifty-year-old controversy. The most lucid and concise account of this dispute (for non-economists) we know of is an essay by Fritz Machlup in _Essays on Hayek_ (1976). Machlup is another eminent Austrian who taught at Princeton and is a past president of the American Economics Association. He is sympathetic to Hayek but fair to Keynes. The book is, unfortunately, out of print, but probably not difficult to find. As to the final fate of Keynes, we can only note that his reputation is much diminished in recent years, while Hayek's has risen. At the 1997 convention of the American Economics Association, there was a session called "Is there a Core of Practical Macroeconomcs That We Should all Believe?," suggesting that there is considerable disarray in the macro school which was once confident that it was smart enough to not only understand but "fine-tune" modern economies. See also: Ben W. Bolch, "Is Macroeconomics Believable?" in The Independent Review, vol 2, No4 (Spring 1998). 4. _The Road to Serfdom_ The fiftieth anniversary edition was published by University of Chicago in 1994, and is still in print. It includes a new introduction by Hayek's friend and fellow Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and Hayek's lengthy preface to the 1956 edition. RTS has been roundly praised, here and elsewhere, as a classic, and it surely is. But it should be noted that much of the book's argument turns on people, issues and events of the 30s and 40s which some readers born after WW II may find a bit murky. The "classical" central-planning socialism criticized by Hayek in 1944 has been succeeded by socialism "lite" -- the pervasive regulate-and- redistribute regimes with which we cope at century's-end, and a bit of translation is required to see that it is the same vinegary wine in a new bottle. A reader who wants a short, sharp summing-up adjusted for recent fashions in statism might prefer _The Fatal Conceit_ (1989), Hayek's parting shot in his ninetieth year. No single book encompasses all of Hayek's thought, but those who are not much interested in technical economics, are pressed for time, and want to read the best single, systematic statement of Hayek's philosophy might better take up his _The Constitution of Liberty_ (1960). RTS is available for a paltry $8.76 from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0226320618/o/qid=908170736/sr=2-1/ 002-2884821-8302613 CoL (1978 trade PB edition) is $19.95: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0226320847/qid%3D908170912/ 002-2884821-8302613 TFC (1991 trade PB edition) is $12.00: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0226320669/r/002-2884821-8302613 4. The "Hayek" genetic algorithm program... A brief abstract of Dr Baum's presentation is available at: http://www.bionomics.org/text/events/conf96/ abstracts/abBowlBaum.html 5. Hayek on the Web There are a number of good Hayekian resources on the Net, but the only one you really need is the excellent Friedrich Hayek Scholars' Page at http://members.aol.com/gregransom/ hayekpage.htm It's maintained by Professor Greg Ransom of Mira Costa College, and contains links to every substantial bit of Hayekiana on the Web. A cornucopia. ============================================== TCR is published by Steve Hyde and John LeGere, and written, more often than not, by John LeGere.. Comments, brickbats, and inquiries can be addressed to us at CONSILRPT(a)aol.com Please feel free to forward this issue to whomever you please, leaving our boilerplate intact. If you know discerning people who would like to receive TCR, send a subscription request to CONSILRPT(a)aol.com. =============================================== --- You are currently subscribed to consilience-report as: [rah(a)shipwright.com] To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-consilience-report-262839E(a)lists.lyris.net --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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