CAN THE GOVERNMENT BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB? by mercury@well.sf.ca.us <Michael E. Marotta> Long ago, Captain Kirk and his crew stumbled on a Nazi planet. A Federation dude found them earlier and decided to industrialize their society by the "most efficient" means possible. No one was surprised at this. In "Mirror, Mirror" Spock-2 predicts that the Evil Federation will collapse. This was also accepted without comment. Star Trek, perhaps more than any other mass media production, reflects the American psyche. Americans, of course, are humans. Human nature accepts dualities easily. On the one hand, people admire the conqueror. On the other, the historical evidence is never denied: empires always collapse. (Look at what remains: farming, writing, arithmetic, ships and chariots, clothing,... These are useful.) Not so long ago, Ayn Rand showed that evil only triumphs when good people work f+ it. When good people do nothing, evil fails. Cypherpunks know that centralized systems are inefficient, yet they fear the NSA. Cypherpunks know that government employees are slugabeds, yet they fear the NSA. Cypherpunks know that qinnovation and enterprise are the antithesis of socialism, yet they fear the NSA. They don't fear that the NSA will kick in their doors and shoot them in a cybernetic Kristallnacht or burn t(their homes the way the Romans and Mongols did to Carthage and Samarkand. (Waco comes to mind, here.) No, the Cypherpunk is afraid that the government has "powerful computers" capable of a "brute force attack" on their algorithms. It may be true. Having Archimedes in town only bought the Syracusans time, it didn't assure them victory. The US Govt drafted 90% of the physicists in the world, gave them virtually unlimited resources and in five years, it had atomic bombs. The American and Soviet governments proved that they could harness nineteenth century technology and shoot things into space. (According to Willey Ley what made their rockets possible was the pumps which came from fire trucks.) Ask "anyone" and they will tell you that World War Two brought us nuclear power, spaceships, radar, television, the transistor, the computer, canned food, and recycling. In fact, it brought none of these. They already existed. Absent the person with an idea, the Government would still be beating farmers with rods for not giving up their goats and grain. (The pharoah's toughs used sticks with sharp stones in them until bronze came along. Later, their bronze weapons were chopped up by people with iron. Why didn't the pharoah's priests discover bronze and iron?) Both William Friedman and the man he detested, Herbert O. Yardley, despaired in wartime for the lack of people with "cipher sense." An infinite number of clerks with typewriters could not break the simplest code. The government enlisted people who liked crossword puzzles, mathematicians, polyglots, anyone and everyone who played with symbols. It made no difference. There was no way to tell who had "cipher sense" and there was no way to TEACH it. Friedman was an obsessive-compulsive who worked himself into a neurotic frenzy, breaking the Purple Code. Turing delivered the "Bombe" that broke Enigma. You know the people who could break DES, RSA, PGP, etc. Shamir unpacked Diffie's knapsack. What is most probable, is that these ciphers will stand for some unforeseeable time until someone who may not be born yet comes along and breaks them all as an idle {exercise on her way to greatness in another field. But the NSA? No way, Jose. They might be nerds who hacked some code at 3 am. But you put them on a salary and benefits in a pyramid, then tell them not to talk about their work, and you thwart whatever creativity they had. The NSA can kill you. But t({they can never out-think you. qiM{iW{x