Hello, I think the official cyberpunk White House (Pres. Bill Clinton) letter would be a great idea, although my experience is that the more you want to say, the more people will say "that's not for cypherpunks to say" or "I don't agree with that as a cypherpunk" and that it will be hard to build consensus. But, on the other hand, a lot of cypherpunks are kind of extremists that may even say some things don't go far enough. Anyway, here are some possible topics, as bland as I can make them (but are all actually highly controverial): 1. Off the tip of the mailing list's tongue, phone encryption particularly in cellular and hand-held phones. The recent article from the Sunday Times posted here stated that

Despite the changes, it will be still virtually impossible for any amateur eavesdropper to intercept calls made on the digital mobile phones.

Hm, that's pretty questionable. Maybe we shouldn't make it a black and white issue, but codes seem to me to be either broken or unbroken, and the former is insecure and unusable whereas the latter is not. There are already examples of situations where lack of encryption led to outrageous breaches of privacy--both Princess Diana and her previous husband can attest to that! Clinton could put pressure on intelligence agencies in the U.S. to allow strong encryption for cellular phones, pass laws, or whatever, and eventually commit to security in phone calls. What do you think, cypherpunks? Should the government be allowed to wiretap "at all"? Is it a "right" of the government? (prepare for the flames) Should we insist on completely unlimited use of cryptography? Is any other scenario practical? Is anything but this inevitable? (uh oh, some opinion creeping in there) Introduction of strong cryptography in hand-held phones could be *the* stepping stone for widespread introduction of cryptography, if the battle is won and becomes publicized enough. I think if this was painted in the right way, we could really get a lot of public support for ideas like "I should be able to know when someone is listening to my calls" or "I should be able to protect from that" or "I know when somebody opens my mail, why not my phone calls?" or "that's not something I want my government to be doing anyway". 2. The new national network NREN supported by the NSF will have massive data communications capabilities, many times the bandwidth of the current internet. There are plenty of "guidelines" that could be established on its use. For example, how about commercial traffic? Are there restrictions on traffic? I think the "new world highways" analogy works here. While we can get and go on a highway whenever we want, and carry loads up to certain reasonable restrictions, we have to get licensed. Also, commercial companies rely on them heavily and our economy is immensely dependent on them (they benefit it immensely). Should we oppose all taxes and licensing? Limitations on total traffic permitted? Believe it or not, these will become *hot* issues soon. Bigger than the time the FCC was thinking of taxing modem use. Keep in mind, we might be able to make arguments that the ideas like "volume" are somewhat obsolete in terms of networks, in which in many cases sending very large amounts of data is as costly (or even less so, because of overhead) than sending smaller amounts. Even if someone was charged based on quantity of use, the actual money involved would have to be something like $.0001/meg (I hope). 3. There are lot of restrictions and regulations on networks right now. For example, there are rules that prevent telephone companies from providing "information services" over telephone lines, apparently originating by rather bold but successful cable company lobbyists. Should these be removed? 4. Fiber optics will be penetrating into a lot of homes over the next few years. This will be related to the network expansion mentioned above. Should these be maintained and installed by private companies? Should there be limitations on the size of the companies running the networks? 5. In the letter, we should look at trying to explain our interests and backgrounds. Who ARE we to ask these things? A bunch of teenage computer geeks and hackers? Computer professionals with a serious interest in privacy, with important tax-paying jobs? I don't really know the answer to this one! I'd be willing to hammer up some rough drafts, if no one objects, but we need to hash this out, and decide about some kind of voting procedure, I would say (majority passing? line-item veto?) I suppose the one really major consensus of the cypherpunks is the commitment to cryptography and the believe that it should be unregulated and freely used. So, if all this sounds too involved, we could go the simple route and just fix up Eric Hugh's group charter to send to Pres. Clinton. ltr. P.S. Here's a product that would *really* bring the issue of cryptography to the forefront, making the public aware of it and partial to it, and is just waiting to be invented by somebody with a flair for electronics, packaging, and marketing. Encryption technology is becoming pretty inexpensive, and even some simple techniques are better than nothing and not trivial to get around for the big bureacracies that do wiretapping. Imagine a single little plastic cup that could be placed over a phone reciever with all the cheap encryption electronics built in (maybe even analog based). Market it in every drugstore and discount store in existence in real flashy ways. Protect your calls! Just slip it on your phone! Use it to talk to your friends! etc. introducing the CRYPTOCUP only $9.99. The thing could be adaptive, like pick one of 10 or 100 preprogrammed codes when it finds another of the same at the other end of the line. Or, maybe some one-time PADs could be used by the users using touch-tones. You could even market it as a child's toy: imagine that the kid could slip it over his mouth and yell through it. Another kid with a receiving speaker could decrypt this into earphones or something. Now, to other kids on the playground, all they hear is goofyspeak that sounds like pig latin from the pair, but the two kids are able to talk about throwing snowballs at Suzy or whatever (endless laughs and hilarity). You could have all kinds of spiffy TV commercials with little kids pretending to be spies, with the costumes and everything. Wow! You could sell a LOT of these if it was done right. This would be like the 20th century equivalent of the cups-and-string thing. (Just make sure I get plenty of royalties :) Or how about this? For us cypherpunks, the "kids toy" thing could be little cover for the use that it was *designed* for: use over phones. The "kid toy" thing would just be a way to get it to be widespread so that everybody had one and knew what it did. Then, the rumors would start. Wow! They fit on phones! Drug dealer's use em! People having affairs use 'em! Businessmen use 'em! EVERYBODY uses em! Coach to team player: did you remember your CUP? Yes Sir! Coach starts yelling plays at quarterback. Girlfriends would ask their boyfriends to slip 'em on before they started (do you have the PROTECTION with you?). Then, we take over the world. HAHAHAHA <- evil laugh If this was cheap enough, people might buy it just for the novelty of it. Especially if you don't have to choose the code, just slip it on and it works (maybe with the better versions, you could pick the code). The point is, infiltrate the economy to the point where any kind of silly regulation of "cryptography" would be perceived as completely ridiculous by the general population. "What are we going to do?" They'd say, "register every kid's CRYPTOCUP? HAHAHAHAHA!" <- side splitting laugh at the sheer stupidity of government. (Yeah, we have a great one---once they even tried to regulate CRYPTOCUPS! HAHAHAHA! <- now sides starting to hurt) OK (regaining my composure and sanity), so if we're really boring, I suppose we could go the route of just pressing for encryption in cellular phones. Or maybe just the middleaged employed people on the group could go that route, and all the teenage hackers work on the toy. P.S. how big is cypherpunks now anyway? I'm interested in embarrassing myself in front of as many people as possible. :)