-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 1:06 PM -0400 on 10/17/00, George@orwellian.org forwards from Fox News:
# The U.S. National Security Agency wants to do battle in cyberspace.
Marvellous. But they'll have to get in line behind every corporate IT department, as people like Whitfield Diffie have already observed. "Infowar" will be -- is being -- fought by business, because government in this sphere is too damned slow -- too expensive -- to be of much use there. Put another way, it won't be the NSA which does our computer security, and, if any third party does it at all, it'll be firms like Counterpane and L0pht/@Stake, operating like those fictional private protection "rackets" in Vernor Vinge's anarcho-capitalist chestnut novella _The Ungoverned_. All of which proves, once again, that financial, not political, cryptography is the only crypto that really matters. Speaking of finance, :-), I'm reading a book about the Medici at the moment, and that reminds me of something almost pertinant, here: the Pope had troops once, too. In fact, in a manner of speaking, he still does, in the form of the Swiss Guards. Note, of course othogonally, that Switzerland itself hasn't gone to war much either, lately, any more than the Vatican has. Even the Knights Hospitaler "control" a few hundred square yards of floorspace, speaking of the Vatican. Anyway, just like the Pope's "troops" can only manage to guard the Vatican, so too will government computer security apparatchiks only be able to guard a given government's own systems, and not much of those of it's "faithful". It would cost too much in real economic terms to do, and, like "buying" force from nation-states is cheaper than it is from one's religious denomination, buying computer security is cheaper in the private market than it ever will be obtainable from any nation-state. Dan Geer's observation of a firm's borders as the symmetric/asymmetric key boundary, and of course, Coase's theorem of transaction cost and firm size are probably two really good theoretical reasons for this. Force itself may be cheaper from private-non-monopolistic markets someday as well, but that's beside my point, here, except that they'll both be results of Moore's law and its effect not only on the information costs of price discovery, but on the mechanical, risk adjusted costs of transactions themselves, through internet bearer transactions. Just like the Swiss Guards -- or, more properly, like Neal Stephenson's "FEDS" in _Snow Crash_ who, after all, were just another franchise -- the NSA will eventually only be able to "patrol" the cypherspace boundries of its own installations, and not much further. Of course, like the Medici popes, they might be able to thrash around in cypherspace a whole bunch before they stop actually trying to do so... Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.8 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQEVAwUBOeyaRsUCGwxmWcHhAQHfxAf/XAO3COMo2JyLwv3wy5Zus0WDa8oNkk0z lhijmsJkC82pPY220Ho8x5BRlyGvqiTiDbTx6s8Pa1d9G9F5l4eP8iFPzPlMXv0N VYGRxbuAx5lgy8KLe9mk7KY/wL427Q4E4L0yeviJGiD1h6CFUgwe947FIuJHZq68 ZJpxUdQgfkgrn8AZJd1QK//zbNf+fWR203I4oBlOtOJJf9DXXS2SMkdAvr/XcqJE HZYHASysuelusd4wv8PD5IfNSLhuAkzCLoRgD+4s2Kw6fF49Nr0ZQgFA2lnRLXMM txPVKuZPztF5nABP5YaBSZQjYeyAEndrXQLcvqhmZlPsJIEGAJUK4g== =9OiI -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.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'