But could the government ban a book today? Of course not, at least not after one person typed it or scanned it into a computer. Technological gains are permanent. The political approach is only useful as a tactical weapon, to hold them off until technological solutions are in place. If you want to change the world, don't protest. Write code!
This position seems to be fast becoming cypherpunks dogma, but I don't agree. The notion that we can just fade into cypherspace and ignore the unpleasant political realities is unrealistic, in my view.
Have people forgotten the Clipper proposal, with the possible follow-on to make non-Clipper encryption illegal? To the extent this proposal has been or will be defeated, it will happen through political maneuvering, not technology.
Yes, when something fascistic like Digital Telephony or Clipper comes along, we have to fight it. But if we win, it will just return the next time something scares the government. There can be no permanent victory through politics. The only way to win permanently is to hold them off through politics and public opinion long enough so that everyone has encryption and is using it. If it's widespread enough, it will be impossible both technically and politically to stop it. Stalin refused to build a phone system in the Soviet Union, because he considered it subversive. Could the government take away all our phones today?
Have people forgotten the PGP export investigation? Phil Zimmermann hasn't. He and others may be facing the prospect of ten years in prison if they were found guilty of illegal export. If anyone has any suggestions for how to escape from jail into cyberspace I'd like to hear about them.
Yes, we have to mobilize around the Zimmermann case, and if he actually goes to trial, I'm going to send in my contribution and try to get others to do so. Perhaps the next version of Secure Drive should have a request of the form: if you like this product, please send a contribution to the Phil Zimmermann Defense Fund. They may be able to single out individuals who have put themselves on the spot, but they can't stop the technology.
Mike's SecureDrive is a terrific program for protecting privacy. But if we want to keep keys secret from politically-motivated investigations, we have to rely on the very political and non-technological Fifth Amendment (an amendment which Mike Godwin of EFF and others contend does not actually protect disclosure of cryptographic keys). Again, we need to win political, not technological, victories in order to protect our privacy.
And the next time there's a Red scare, or a Yellow scare, or any kind of scare, they will say "national security" or "public safety" and start putting people in camps, like the Japanese. Political victories are temporary. Whatever the Constitution says, the fact is it has been blatantly ignored every time the government imagined a threat, starting with the Sedition Act only a few years after the Bill of Rights was passed. The Supreme Court has never stopped one of those actions until after the scare was over.
I even question Mike's point about the government's inability to ban books. Look at the difficulty in keeping PGP available in this country even though it is legal. Not only have FTP sites been steadily closed down, even the key servers have as well. And this is legal software.
Yet almost everyone I talk to has a copy. It's on BBSes all over the country, and hundreds of thousands of people have it. Maybe millions, worldwide. I've sent it to many people by modem and on disks. It's even on CD-ROMs. Are they going to confiscate them all? What are they going to do, shoot everyone caught with a copy? That is bad for public relations.
Sure, this software is currently available overseas, but that is because PGP's only legal limitations are the U.S. patent issues. Imagine how much worse it would be if non-escrowed encryption were made illegal in a broad range of countries, with stringent limits on net access to countries which promote illegal software? Here again, these kinds of decisions will be made in the political realm.
Fundamentally, I believe we will have the kind of society that most people want. If we want freedom and privacy, we must persuade others that these are worth having. There are no shortcuts. Withdrawing into technology is like pulling the blankets over your head. It feels good for a while, until reality catches up. The next Clipper or Digital Telephony proposal will provide a rude awakening.
Ultimately the people have to want it. Very true. And the best way to get them to want it is to provide it. Let them see how much more freely they talk when their mail is encrypted. How they can write and store what they want, when their hard drives are encrypted. If the public experiences real privacy, they will want it, and it will be harder to take away. They will even be willing to buy it. In the long run, PGP may well be the best thing that ever happened to James Bidzos, just like the pirating of Altair Basic was the best thing that ever happened to Bill Gates. Politics, the process of politics and the political mindset, is our enemy. Governments cannot create freedom; they can either leave it alone or take it away. We must prevent them from taking it away, until it is so widespread and universal that it can't be taken away. --- Mike