At 12:22 PM 11/7/96 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote:

It appears to be widely believed that cryptoanarchy is irreversible. Everybody believes that the race to deploy or forbid strong cryptography will define the outcome for a long time.

I can't think of a reason why this should be so.

If the wide use of strong cryptography results in widely unpopular activities such as sarin attacks and political assassinations, it would not be all that hard to forbid it, even after deployment.

Simple analogy: Suppose you put two people into a room with a deck of playing cards and a table, instructing "Person A" to build a house-of-cards, and telling "Person B" to stop him from achieving his goal. Who do you think will win? Obviously, the latter will win: It's vastly easier to knock such a structure down than to build it in the first place, and all "Person B" has to do is occasionally take a whack at the structure. BTW, some of your confusion is probably based is the false assumptions in your last sentence above. "..wide use of strong cryptography results in widely unpopular activities such as sarin attacks and political assassinations." First, I contend that the unpopularity of political assassinations is based far less on their presumed undesirability, and much more so on the fact that the average citizen (currently) has no input on who is being killed. He might well suppose that the killings are trying to deny him the little power and influence he has in the political system. ("They shot [fill in the blank}! I voted for him!") But what if assassination was made far more accessible to the common man? Suppose, say, the approval of one million citizens was the only thing necessary to have an assassination legally accomplished? Or, more likely in practice, the vote of a million citizens was interpreted as a kind of terminal veto over that particular politician or government employee, who would have to resign or face the (lethal) consquences! In that case, assassinations wouldn't be seen as bad, they'd be the natural consequence of a politician who overstays his welcome and ignores numerous warnings. Second, things like "sarin attacks" are, in fact, the classic example of actions which WOULD NOT HAPPEN under a crypto-anarchy. Over the last 30 years or so, "terrorism" has come to be associated with random attacks on innocent citizens. But I propose that such attacks only occur because the better, more appropriate targets are purposely made hard to attack. Most people don't realize this. But consider: Wouldn't the people who bombed the OKC Federal building have preferred to kill, for example, the top 50 government officials responsible for Waco and Ruby Ridge, rather than 150 ordinary government employees? Of course they would! If crypto-anarchy means anything to the future of terrorism, it's about helping to ensure that the people truly guilty of oppression get targeted in preference to anybody else. Naturally, such a point of view will be wildly unpopular...with the guilty few. The rest of us should like it just fine. This is why crypto-anarchy will be so popular with the public once it's in place. No more taxes, governments, militaries, wars, holocausts, etc. _THAT'S_ yet one more reason why it's irreversible: people will have seen the results of both systems, and they'll be damned if they're going to allow crooked politicians back in the game! Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com