At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:
If I remember Black Unicorn's posts some months back about the Seychelles, The Rene government will protect you from extradition from any country with their military for what? $6 million?
Or until a higher bid comes in.... Really, there is no security in meatspace. Not compared to the security mathematics provides. Whether floating offshore barges or abandoned oil rigs or compliant Third World dictatorships, no "data haven" with an identifiable nexus in meatspace will last for long, at least not serving all types of materials. When I read Sterling's "Islands in the Net," in 1988, I was initially upset that he'd "discovered" my own developing ideas about data havens (though I called it crypto anarchy), but then pleased to see how he he'd missed the boat on the role cyberspace and strong crypto would inevitably play. But the legacy of "data havens" is that people get the wrong idea, by thinking of a data haven as a "place." In actuality, what's important are the retrieval mechanisms, not the place things are possibly stored. Hence approaches like Blacknet. (The parallels with the international money system are obvious...it is less important each year that passes just "where" the underlying store of value is physically stored. There are some important issues and differences, though.) --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."