At 02:06 PM 9/26/96 -0500, snow wrote:
Mr. Beck said:
Been reading the AP thread, and thought I'd donate some of my views.
the Internet. You'd just cause the government to panic, and this would have negative effects, it would take ages for them to calm down, and the laws they'd pass in the mean time would mean a near certainty of mandatory GAK as a condition to switching the Internet back on. (Before someone takes me to task for the impossibility of switching the Internet off, it all depends on the level of government panic. More specifically perhaps they would disconnect key backbones, and ISPs briefly while they rushed into effect a few presidential decrees outlawing non GAKed crypto, anonymous ecash, remailers, PGP, DC-nets, etc.)
This would be cutting their own throats. There is SO much commercial and government traffic going across "The Net" that many businesses would scream bloody murder, and the government would have MASSIVE trouble with it's agenda.
Yes, that "they'll cut off the Internet!" talk doesn't seem to be very practical. Society very quickly develops dependency on inventions. Try to take away their computers and they'd scream; take away their telephone and it'd be worse! Give Internet another couple of years and 50% of big business would be severely impacted should it be cut off. Wait five years and the world would practically stop rotating without Internet. On a related issue, GPS (global-positioning system) contains a de-accurizing mis-feature called S/A, which adds a little error to the location as detected by a receiver. Ostensibly, it was added so that this could be turned on in wartime, to deny the enemy the ability to make 10-meter fixes. Turns out that it was kept on all the time, probably because if it WASN'T it would become politically impossible to de-accurize the system even in wartime. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com