We appear to be entering the long-awaited "Crypto Singularity." (Well, long-awaited by me at least!) A "singularity" in the sense of extremely rapid changes in outlook, technology, and culture. (The use comes from Vernor Vinge's science fictional "singularity" in new technologies, as described in "Marooned in Realtime," and appropriated for their own purposes by the nanotechnology enthusiasts.) Some evidence for this "Crypto Singularity": * the appearance of fully-encrypted remailers, using the Perl scripts of Eric Hughes and Hal Finney. With several more such remailing sites (and recall John Little's offer to place the s/w on Portal), a critical mass of remailers may exist. (A packet remailed through 10 remailers, each storing 10 such encrypted packets before remailing, has an intrinsic diffusivity of 10^10. Of course, there will be far fewer than 10 billion messages, but the point is clear that the origin of a message is effectively untraceable.) * the spread of PGP, onto Internet sites, FidoNet, and hacker boards, IRCs, and the like. (I expect the adoption of PGP by the phone hacker/phreaker community--the community so far the main target of formal charges, as in the Legion of Doom, Len Rose, and Sun Devil cases--is setting off alarms in the law enforcement community.) * the "Hacker Crackdown" spreading to "2600" (will Cyperpunks be next? Will the 150-200 of us get raided?) and mere _meetings_ of hacker folks. * the incredible excitement over these topics at the Hackers Conference, with the sense that these are no longer just abstract ideas. * the interest by several journalists in covering these matters (more on this if things develop). * articles in "Scientific American" just in the past months...David Chaum's work on digital cash, and quantum cryptography. * the firestorm of comments (over 500) about the proposal to register cryptographic keys. All of these point to an accelerating situation. Things may get very interesting and very sticky in the next several months, which is quite a bit faster than I'd expected. Justice and the FBI may not wait until the next Administration to get something started. Perhaps a high-publicity case involving drugs or child molestors will be used as a pretext to crack down. This crackdown may not need new laws...the existing conspiracy, RICI Act, and espionage laws may be enough to "set some examples." Our next Cypherpunks meeting (Saturday, 21 November) should look at some of these issues. "Time is of the essence." --Tim -- .......................................................................... 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 | PGP Public Key: awaiting Macintosh version.