-- Clay Shirky: http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html tells us "The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed" [...] The Government's failure to get the Clipper implemented came at a heady time for advocates of digital privacy -- the NSA was losing control of cryptographic products, Phil Zimmerman had launched his Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) email program, and the Cypherpunks, a merry band of crypto-loving civil libertarians, were on the cover of the second issue of Wired. The floodgates were opening, leading to... ...pretty much nothing. Even after the death of Clipper and the launch of PGP, the Government discovered that for the most part, users didn't want to encrypt their communications. [...] [...] In response to the RIAA's suits, users who want to share music files are adopting tools like WINW and BadBlue, that allow them to create encrypted spaces where they can share files and converse with one another. [...] Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon. [...] And the second effect, of course, is the long-predicted and oft-delayed spread of encryption. The RIAA is succeeding where the Cypherpunks failed, convincing users to trade a broad but penetrable privacy for unbreakable anonymity under their personal control. In contrast to the Cypherpunks "eat your peas" approach, touting encryption as a first-order service users should work to embrace, encryption is now becoming a background feature of collaborative workspaces. Because encryption is becoming something that must run in the background, there is now an incentive to make it's adoption as easy and transparent to the user as possible. It's too early to say how widely casual encryption use will spread, but it isn't too early to see that the shift is both profound and irreversible. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wLK7Dc2wMIugparyQpFCHa89wES4ntXo7L+st+YX 4hxJwRJeTzuUKuQ0sTXvnvLTI/EeUy2RRjum92Pp8