At 3:46 PM -0500 1/10/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 12:22:52PM -0500, John Young wrote:
The full story of crypto is yet to be written, in particular its deceptions, perhaps a piece by Vin McLelland, one by Declan, one by Tim May, if not by distributed cyperhpunks not quite so malleable as solo individuals given privileged access on the condition that . . .
True. As a journalist, I do my best to avoid those conditions. I think of them (probably not an original thought) as entangling alliances.
I could easily cobble together a book proposal that would include chapters by cypherpunk types; I'd edit. I've been thinking of writing a book for a while -- even had meetings with publishers in '96 -- but it would take too much time. Editing would be far easier.
I hope you don't do this. There have been several of these kinds of collections--a guy at MIT has done at least a couple of them (I forget his name, though three of my short pieces are in one of his books: the books cost $40-60 or so, for a damned paperback, which is why I don't have my own copy. Even at this high price, they don't pay for submissions and they don't even give out copies to contributors!). What you'd end up with is a printed collection of a bunch of mini-rants or survey articles, whose total verbiage is just a tiny snapshot of the field. There's probably a role for a good book on, say, "digital money," with a mix of overview articles and detailed articles. This would be a _lot_ of work, and the editor would need to be well-versed in the field. But not a book on "Cypherpunk" themes. Too many seemingly-unrelated areas, too much background to cover (ironically, compared to digital money, but I think this is so). And Yog help you if you end up just putting together whatever junky stuff people are willing to submit.
What about that timing of CRYPTO release and the NSA show?
Ah, it was a lackluster show and not that important.
I didn't see it, but I assume it was like most of the past t.v. shows on the NSA and codes and such: Discovery Channel, History Channel, BBC "Horizon," CNN, etc. These shows are easy for producers to put together: lots of shots of radomes and antennas and NSA buildings, a tour of the Cryptologic Museum, some obligatory juicy stuff about Enigma and Turing, interviews with talking heads about the need for blah blah, and so on. Feh. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns