-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 3:38 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Robert Hettinga wrote about Ryan Lackey's whereabouts, on cypherpunks:
If I told you, I would have to kill you?
Whew. Glad Ryan has now said something publically now about his and Ian's bit of extraterritorial subtrifuge (though Ian doesn't qualify, of course). I mean, I just *hate* keeping secrets... ;-). Frankly, I *really* have a hard time with all this man-without-a-first-world-country, crypto-expat stuff. I think making the technology not eonomically optional is the way to change things, and no amount of romantic, jurisdiction-shopping "regulatory arbitrage" is going to alter reality all that much. But, I guess, Anguilla's as nice a place to have this affliction as any I can think of. And, I wish Vince -- and now, apparently, Ryan -- good luck, whatever happens. Yet, for some reason, memories of Vietnam-era draft-dodgers keep coming to mind. For what it cost them all personally, not much good came of it, I'd say, for them or anyone else. The people who protested the war and "fought the good fight" to end it stayed here to do it, after all. The most potent anti-war activists were Vietnam vets themselves, for that matter. And, of course, Ridgeway told Eisenhower at the outset that Vietnam was a multi-million-man war, and Eisenhower stayed out accordingly, throwing a few marginal people on the ground to shut Lodge up. It took Testosterone Jack to get a Special-Forces hard-on. Eventually he and Desktop Lyndon ended up screwing a pooch instead of the commies. Do people out there really think somebody like Gore's going to do a crypto-amnesty someday? I didn't think so. Ashcroft, maybe, but don't hold your breath, there, either. It'll be decades, I bet, and our "boys over there" will have grey hair long before they do come back home on this one. Political inertia is probably going to keep a few people we know outside the fence, looking in, for an awful long time after the issue's utterly dead. I expect people who do this crypto-expat stuff are going to get their new passports refused at the U.S. border when they visit, and I think that things are going to get worse for them for a long time before they get better. Of course, there's a fair argument to be made that if they do get refused, it's probably time to leave, anyway, but I'll let someone else gnaw that bone. And, frankly, I *do* expect that the FBI will attempt domestic crypto controls, just like they've been been trying to do for some time now. But, unlike a lot of people, I think that the marketplace will steamroller all such silliness into yet another roadtop attraction, before or after its legislation. Anyway, as the old "excrable" e$yllogism goes, Digital commerce is financial cryptography. Financial cryptography is strong cryptography. Therefore, if there's no strong cryptography, there's no digital commerce. So, call me an optimist. Like I've said before, I've heard the end of life and liberty as we know it predicted over and over again -- hell, I've even believed so myself, once or twice -- but, like the Gibbon quote in my .sig goes, "however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity", I ain't seen it happen yet. Cheers, Bob Hettinga -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.5.5 iQEVAwUBNfRQJMUCGwxmWcHhAQHb7gf+ImnoGG28coDgde4cDgnwHyQatO78nY4B 9bMfB9bE1FCqAIZNKfrPzqhJpZzCbYEDYQexXe8bRsl32M7FnIye7w4r7kxeXxns LbLWY83juOAJNgMhPxPhFVcXb8NqwOQzCnYjLdfKSuJ6/lZuNGvsVohHwYuhNxc9 WlOW1WsqeSl3KyzpdDyZU1jAUvNEJQU9JoeeEvlwFNM7zMW3ZoIQB5SSVLf2HYzX vtpnZiRsOeSXt0sWmlXHiZ+DeB+79z1z157cg/AOn/qAGBLBgZuDp+dbRH7B4ynR ngB6XS+irSzNnMWQrVdNYPuRPRRQ+h/eV+US2Cmjc3uuFcnR/+tnNg== =0UKh -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.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'