I was able to "christen" a brand new newsgroup, "alt.politics.datahighway," with this posting. For those of you who have announced that you do not like to see political points raised in the Cypherpunks group, that only serious discussion of the XJ9 e-mail protocols and their MIME compliance is a worthy topic, I say that a bit of politics is always appropriate. In any case, Cyperpunks believe in kill files, I hope. -Tim Newsgroups: alt.politics.datahighway From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Subject: Clipper and Tipper on Route 666 Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1993 03:11:10 GMT The Clipper chip, introduced by the Clinton Administration to ensure that they can easily listen in on our phone conversations, is closely related to Albert Gore's "National Information Infrastructure." To ensure that the Net of the Future is safe for K-12 outings and field trips and that perverts and dissidents are kept off this national resource, a special chip has been developed which censors obscene speech, rock music lyrics, and non-Baptist religious speech. This chip is known as the "Tipper" chip. (Many other chips exist in this family of "X-ippper" chips, including the Navy's Flipper chip, RCA's Nipper chip, DEC's Pipper chip, and so on.) Perhaps we can encourage the "700 Club," which did an excellent attack piece on Clipper (yes, seriously, they did), to attack the ClintonNet "data superhighway." I suggest they call it "Route 666." As you may be able to tell from my satire here, I consider the Data Superhighway a boondoggle at best and a dangerous move toward centralilzed computing at worst. A few days ago, at the Hackers Conference, I expressed this view to Tom Kalil, of the White House. He apparently is one of the charmingly named "policy wonks" responsible for planning our digital future. A pleasant enough guy, but I don't want him or any other policy wonk planning the future of the networks. The free market has produced--and is continuing to produce at a breakneck speed--a diverse, vigorous international network. From local LANs to fiber to satellites to a variety of even faster links, there is no lack of alternatives. And unlike the National Interstate Highway System, to which the NII is often compared (perhaps wrongly...), there is absolutely no need for the government to get involved. No land is needed (as was the case in the 1950s when the Interstates were being built), and no centralized planning is needed. Do we want networks built and run by the equivalent of the Postal Service--or by the equivalent of FedEx and Airborne? A government effort will likely skew normal market forces, lay network lines in places they are not needed, be built by the pork barrel procurement policies that have given us so many other boondoggles, and will turn engineers into proposal-writing pigs at the public trough. I say we kill the Data Superhighway the way we killed the Supercollider. Except, this time let's do it before we spend a few billion bucks we don't have. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it.