Pete Carpenter (welcome, Pete!) writes: ....stuff about a radio call-in show elided....

But no, the guy went off into a 'statement' about how the goverment wants to interfere with 'digital money', and the moderator cut him off, dry. No disscussion - substitute some other question about jobs.

The moral of the story is - KISS! keep it simple, when talking about these issues to the general public. Privacy in the electronic age is something that everyone can understand. And quite a few 'regular' people are very much concerned. Offer wide spread public encryption technology as a solution to the problem.

But PLEASE, don't gum up (public) disscussion with esoterica like 'digital money'. Most people don't even understand how 'regular' money works :-)

Point well taken. Most of the stuff we talk about is almost too esoteric for _ourselves_ (well, at times), let alone for the public. Pete's point is that we should keep our message very simple, mostly by focussing on privacy. (This is a theme Tom Jennings has also pushed, even urging this list to drop references to "crypto," which he thinks connotes spies and secrets, and instead replace it with "privacy," which he thinks most people will find more palatable.) But I think trying to educate the public is an absolutely lost cause. The Libertarian Party has been trying for years, and just got the lowest vote percentage in their history. (I suspect the Peace and Freedom Party, or other parties, would admit the same thing.) The average voter believes in UFOs, ghosts, brain cancer from cellular phones, the dangers of nuclear power, psychics, the War on (Some) Drugs, and the whole "democracy" thing. She certainly won't take the time to learn about RSA, digital money, etc. We won't get crypto liberty via the ballot box, we'll get it only if the technology is sound and is deployed widely enough so that attempts to stop it are futile. This has been how the most important changes in society have occurred, from agriculture to printing to telephones: the technology filled some need, spread, and became unstoppable. Convincing the voters at the ballot box was never an issue. Having said this, I agree that there's some role for educating some fraction of the public, so I applaud the many fine efforts of the EFF, CPSR, and so on. And some of these efforts may delay legislation which would make otherwise delay the "Crypto Phase Change." And I suppose I agree with Pete that if and when public forums are held, common sense dictates that the really abstruse stuff be avoided--I know I'd flip to another station if the discussion turned to the intricacies of PERL scripts in remailers! :-} -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: MailSafe and PGP available.