Welcome to new lurkers (if any) from our recent NYT and Newsday publicity. To give you something a little more interesting than "Is Usenet in the Public Domain?" to read, here is my response to Joshua Quittner's column in Newsday.
Tuesday, 01 February 1994
CODING UP A BIT OF PRIVACY
Time is running out for the Cypherpunks.
Actually we have all the time in the world. One cannot build a New Information Infrastructure without including the tools that anyone can use to communicate privately.
This is their central question: In a future world where all information is centralized on a network, where all information is tracked by the bit, where every purchase you make and every communication can be monitored by corporate America, how does privacy survive?
More of a problem in the past than in the future. When P.J. O'Rourke had lived in a small New Hampshire town for a year or so and went to the store to shop for some clothes the clerk remarked, "That's not the brand of underwear you usually buy." One's life was more of an open book in the village and the tribe than it will be in the electronic village. Particularly since you can build private networks/"places" that exclude anyone you want.
"The whole information highway thing is now part of the public eye," explain Eric Hughes, a founder of the Cypherpunk movement. "If we don't change it now, it'll be impossible later."
They dread the coming commercial network of televisions and computers, saying it will displace the Internet and destroy many of the freedoms
Misquote? It's usually better to do the job early than late but the nature of network communications is such that it's hard to control at any time. they
now enjoy.
Surely not the anarcho capitalists who probably represent a majority of active cypherpunks.
For the first time, virtually unbreakable codes are now possible, thanks to computers.
I won't say it. Certainly computers make it easier to *use* encryption.
The the U.S. government is concerned, as governments always are, about the spread of powerful cryptography (terrorists could use it, kidnappers could use it, drug dealers could use it,
Communications intercepts are rarely used to prosecute crimes.
The (Clipper) chip is reviled by Cypherpunks and other civil libertarians because it provides a back door that law-enforcement agencies could enter, with the proper warrants, for surveillance.
Warrants not required, just a certification that the law enforcement agency has proper authority to do a communications intercept.
"I'm starting a bank, and it's not going to be a U.S. bank," Hughes says.
The bank will store depositors' money (he's thinking a $200 minimum deposit) and disburse payments to anyone --- all over the Internet. It will be based abroad, maybe in Mexico.
Where did Mexico come from?
A Cypherpunk network bank is one way to pay for a network of truly encrypted, private communications, you see.
Along with lots of other nice things. Computers have been killing traditional banks for years (ever since they enabled the creation of Money Market Funds in the '70s). Netbank (and its many competitors) will continue the process. *********** Duncan Frissell You don't have to be nice to nation states you meet on the way up if you're not coming back down. --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165