On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 12:35:57AM -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Well, that's about as nice an apology as I've ever seen on any list, let alone cypherpunks. Aimee's initial message deserves a response. (BTW there is a real Waco, Texas lawyer named Aimee Farr who is interested in these issues, though naturally we can't be certain our correspondent is that person.)
She asks for our thoughts on this: http://www.sociology.org/content/vol002.001/ling.html
Any paper that seriously quotes the Rimm "study" and R.U. Siris is suspect. [..]
Since the paper is so flawed, I'm not sure it's worth discussing at length. But, briefly, is crypto as threatening as witches were? Far from it. It -- and its derivative technologies, such as anonymity -- seems to be perceived more as a way to reclaim lost privacy rather than a new and unusual threat. In that sense, it is a conservative technology. (This could change, and certainly the intelligence community is hand-waving about terrorists again, but I doubt it'll have much luck.)
OTOH, there certainly has been another attempt by government to villify crypto users with the recent spate of articles on Osama bin Oceania and other terrorists supposed use of crypto and stego. The Red scare of the 50s was also to a large extent promoted and fanned into flame by elements of the government. While there isn't a "moral boundary crisis" amongst the general public about crypto, there is an attempt at "vilification" and "patterned labelling" of crypto users by the government. And many cypherpunks have predicted the government causing events similar to "crystallization of the crisis through a dramatic act" and "appropriation of the appropriate social apparatus and suppression of critique" of crypto users by the government. (However, few of those beleive that "and finally restoration of a normal situation" would then occur.) The paper doesn't mention the political aspects of either of its examples (another of it's flaws). If you can think of "mass hate" as a politically-motivated inflaming of the masses fears, then the steps that it describes are remarkably similar to the expected political response to crypto-anarchy. -- Eric Murray Consulting Security Architect SecureDesign LLC http://www.securedesignllc.com PGP keyid:E03F65E5