-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Eric Hughes <eric@remailer.net> wrote:
... It's comfortable to write manifestos, express your position, be indignant at the government, and teach privacy. We generally live in free societies where there is little recourse taken against speech. It is must less comfortable to use tortious cryptography, run a remailer, finesse export controls, and deploy code. Far and away the most extreme reactions have come from what people did and not from what they said. Speech affects the world, but action affects it more, because every word that affects the world only through a sequence of body motions. Cypherpunks get listened to not because we talk a lot; that's insufficient. Cypherpunks get listened to because we do things.
I think you make a cogent point here. I agree that it is insufficient for cypherpunks to merely pay lip service to their ideals if they wish to see them prevail. Especially when those who want to build a Surveillance State Infrastructure into the National Information Infrastructure are busy writing legislation, cultivating their media assets, and cutting back room deals. I believe that John Philpot Curran's 18th century assertion that "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active." is true for cypherpunks today. The proponents of government mandated key escrow are certainly "doing something", and in the absence of an active and coordinated opposition, I think they will get their way, and that troubles me deeply. I doubt that they will wait long for the widespread use of seemlessly integrated OLE, OpenDoc compliant crypto tools to become a reality before they make their move. If these tools should arrive and come into widespread use in time to make a difference, it will be because the developers of these tools and those advocating their use were driven to take action by an awareness of the urgent sociopolitical imperatives involved, not the economic ones. I think most of us here appreciate what an insidiously malignant menace government mandated key escrow represents to the survival of our right to privacy and our liberty in general, both now, and even more so in the pervasively networked world we will inhabit in the 21st century. It is my deep conviction that the battle now brewing over the right of the people to freely use cryptography is of the most crucial consequence for the freedom that we, and our children, and our grandchildren will have in the next century and beyond. And it is a battle that will be lost if we don't commit our _deeds_ as well our words to the struggle. This is cause worth "doing something" about. This is a cause worth making sacrifices for. I thought cypherpunks were supposed to be part of the vanguard. If not us who? The unencumbered freedom to use cryptography to preserve our privacy will not prevail on its own; the forces arrayed against it are powerful and determined. If it prevails, it will be because we fought with greater determination, intelligence, and commitment, and were diligent in enlisting allies to our cause by convincing them it was a righteous one. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLuCMnNGJlWF+GPx9AQEtFAQAyJDnJxlk9LcWZl0tjYdMQFs4jI5jPCJr yWBF6y0s4AONotRiwFg8E8leWLHTLKuZvTn92gBNXNC+CMWDn6XZjSuoJbygqmnJ xykHhezOHnn2GcFcSflduLSbBLj76Rpt8odR7uNJ6vDGO8kNRHi0rvV+siGMzKfD 90MfPW2r9sY= =k1vi -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----