Tim May wrote:
Namely, once the infrastructure is deployed, once most electronic commerce is handled via card tokens (and card readers are actually pretty cheap, and volume will drive the price down further), the President can cite some kind of national emergency, or widespread tax evasion, or whatnot, to announce that beginning on suc-and-such a date all cards must be licensed, even to domestic users.
Not to diminish the validity of Tim's alarm, is there not reason to anticipate that these tokens will be crackable. And thus continue the race between crypto enforcers and crackers? In addition to the recent successes against smart cards, there seems to be trouble with the government's program for widespread use of Fortezza cards, according to complaints of various military and civilian sites. The Fortezza site at ljl.com seems to have been set up so that open, easily accessible information could be gotten by the harried military users (see, for example, the list of Fortezza complaints at http://infosec.nosc.mil ). Moreover, there is surely to be continued competition among the players who are trying to increase their market share -- both government and commercial, both domestic and international. Will they not continue to attack each other's crypto products? And will not each nation's government continue to subsidize their favored producers in international economic and military contentions? The point is made on cypherpunks that the odds are increasingly on the crackers even if there are periodic gains by behind-the-scenes plots among the enforcers and there temporary allies (as Tim notes, these are often short- term romances). And that hardware systems are the most vulnerable due to their illusory physical security -- the fatal conceit that brawn can beat brains in crypto, as it claims it used to do in iron- and fire-power (that was before iron became subservient to code). Finally, take a look at the history of these "emergency" Executive Orders outlined in No. 12924 posted by Peter Junger. Then look at the predecessors to those at www.house.gov. They go back through several administrations and confirm what Hal first raised: there is a concerted effort to get around accountability for the continuation of the so-called emergency, and successive Congresses have been complicit in the camouflage.