James Donald writes:
Obviously this catastrophe could not have taken place without the unauthorized use of paper. Paper allows people to communicate dangerous ideas and secret messages.
With paper, anyone can communicate to large numbers of people at once, even if they are not properly authorized or in authority.
The solution is clear. Paper must be a government monopoly . Paper should only be used for government forms and official government statements.
Many people have made this point, but it is so fundamentally wrong that it's hard to believe that anyone takes it seriously. Paper, and metal, and knives, and airplanes, and all the other things which have been compared to anonymity tools, are different in one major respect: it would be an inconceivable hardship to ban them. They all have important uses for other things than committing crimes. To ban paper or airplanes or knives would eliminate all those other uses. Imagine a society without paper. It could not function. Likewise, eliminating those other technologies would at minimum cause tremendous harm to everyone's lives. Can we really say the same thing about cryptography? About steganography tools? About the anonymous mail services which bin Laden has been reported to have used (yesterday on TV it was mentioned several times)? Would commerce grind to a halt if we didn't have anonymous remailers? Of course not. The same with PGP and SSL and other crypto technologies that are available to everyone. The fact is, crypto as we know it is a luxury. It didn't even exist ten years ago. None of the crypto tools we use did. We can hardly make a case that banning or restricting access to them will send us back into the stone age. Please, let's end these spurious arguments that providers of crypto tools are no different than the people who make the metal in the airplane wings. There's a big difference, which anyone with an ounce of sense can see. Banning airplanes is not an option. Banning crypto is.
At 09:10 PM 9/13/2001 +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:
The fact is, crypto as we know it is a luxury. It didn't even exist ten years ago. None of the crypto tools we use did. We can hardly make a case that banning or restricting access to them will send us back into the stone age.
Please, let's end these spurious arguments that providers of crypto tools are no different than the people who make the metal in the airplane wings. There's a big difference, which anyone with an ounce of sense can see. Banning airplanes is not an option. Banning crypto is.
I get the impression that our anonymous correspondent Nomen Nescio (n.b., "nomen nescio" is Latin for "I do not know the the name") is suffering from overexposure to academic discussion, which leads (in some cases) to the impression that the world is full of important policy questions patiently awaiting discussion and analysis ad infinitum (and ad nauseum) by anyone who cares to play Socrates today - and that, pending resolution of irresolvable questions, no action shall be taken, and ongoing activities frozen, until perfect consensus can be reached or a widely-acclaimed policy can be drafted. I propose that this sort of discussion - about whether or not, in the face of violence and tragedy, some aspect of human freedom and expression can be suitably "justified" to satisfy every self-appointed devil's advocate - is absolutely unproductive and serves only to suck energy and concentration from more interesting projects. I don't know (and don't care) if Nomen is an authentic participant in cypherpunks, a nom-de-plume of another subscriber used to advance unpopular arguments (perhaps in hopes of eliciting stronger arguments in favor of that person's real beliefs), an agent provocateur, or something else .. Nomen's internal state is unimportant. The effect of his/her messages is to create a swamp of self-referential argument and discussion which advances nothing; and I suggest that we'd all do well to learn to ignore Nomen as many of us do Choate (and Vulis and Detweiler in times past.) Accordingly, I will not answer Nomen's arguments or questions, but report that I have succeeded in compiling Mixmaster 2.9beta23 on the FreeBSD 4.4 release candidate, and in concert with other cpunks, am putting together a 2.9beta24 package which includes a number of patches recently circulated. We have assembled and are testing an installation of that new release on a well-connected machine in a favorable jurisdiction, with more "hardened" remailer installations on the way. I haven't had any luck yet with OpenBSD (despite helpful messages from two correspondents regarding IDEA and OpenSSL integration) but work on that subject continues. The remailers will not be shut down without a fight - on the net and in the courtrooms. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@well.com "We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids
Nomen Nescio wrote:
The fact is, crypto as we know it is a luxury. It didn't even exist ten years ago. None of the crypto tools we use did. We can hardly make a case that banning or restricting access to them will send us back into the stone age.
Please, let's end these spurious arguments that providers of crypto tools are no different than the people who make the metal in the airplane wings. There's a big difference, which anyone with an ounce of sense can see. Banning airplanes is not an option. Banning crypto is. I disagree. Ten years ago neither the Web nor e-commerce existed, either, and ordinary people had barely heard of email or cell phones. Their privacy was protected by the labor and traceability of intercepting paper mail and tapping analog phones. Without encryption, every national government will have technology to effortlessly spy on all their citizens all the time. Inevitably, some will use it. Saying cryptography is a luxury because it is new is like saying seat belts are a luxury because horse-drawn carriages didn't have them. Howie Goodell -- Howie Goodell hgoodell@cs.uml.edu Pr SW Eng, WearLogic Sc.D. Cand HCI Res Grp CS Dept U Massachussets Lowell http://people.ne.mediaone.net/goodell/howie Dying is soooo 20th-century! http://www.cryonics.org
Many people have made this point, but it is so fundamentally wrong that it's hard to believe that anyone takes it seriously.
No one really does.
Paper, and metal, and knives, and airplanes, and all the other things which have been compared to anonymity tools, are different in one major respect: it would be an inconceivable hardship to ban them.
Can we really say the same thing about cryptography? About steganography tools? About the anonymous mail services which bin Laden has been reported to have used (yesterday on TV it was mentioned several times)?
What you are really talking about when you talk about cryptography is privacy, is individuality, is self determination. Certainly commerce wouldnt' grind to halt if these trivialities were dispensed with. After all, Commerce really is what it is all about isn't it? With the supreme court of the us making judgements on what is good for the consumer, now that the old term taxpayer,or even the arcane term citizen no longer applies.
Would commerce grind to a halt if we didn't have anonymous remailers? Of course not. The same with PGP and SSL and other crypto technologies that are available to everyone.
The fact is, crypto as we know it is a luxury. It didn't even exist ten years ago.
Many things "didn't exist" 10 years ago. The real ability to completely and totally enumerate and track every single transaction and action of every single person and store them to be used if not right away to punish immoral acts, at least keep them on file so that it can be done when the incarceration system gets streamlined. I've heard many calls for complete biometric id systems to be put in place for airline access over the last few days. With such a system, why just use it for gov building access and airports? Why not for banks, 7/11 phone cards, groceries, rent payment etc ad whatever. As more and more trangressions become felonised, and more and crimes become federalised, soon we should be able to deny anything to anyone on pretty much a whim. Governments go bad. Many believe governments are bad period. Hence, crypto. It is the only technological response to a technological society.
None of the crypto tools we use did. We can hardly make a case that banning or restricting access to them will send us back into the stone age.
Please, let's end these spurious arguments that providers of crypto tools are no different than the people who make the metal in the airplane wings. There's a big difference, which anyone with an ounce of sense can see. Banning airplanes is not an option. Banning crypto is.
On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 09:10:13PM +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:
The fact is, crypto as we know it is a luxury. It didn't even exist ten years ago. None of the crypto tools we use did. We can hardly make a case that banning or restricting access to them will send us back into the stone age.
Now we see "Nomen's" true colors. The Internet as we know it did not exist 10 years ago. Cell phones as we know them did not exist 10 years ago. Cable TV as we know it did not exist 10 years ago. Lots of things can be banned under this facist-leaning thinking. -Declan
On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 09:10:13PM +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:
The fact is, crypto as we know it is a luxury. It didn't even exist ten years ago. None of the crypto tools we use did. We can hardly make a case that banning or restricting access to them will send us back into the stone age.
It is in fact PGP's tenth anniversary this year. Not that PGP was the first crypto system. YY
Nomen Nescio wrote: [...]
Can we really say the same thing about cryptography? About steganography tools? About the anonymous mail services which bin Laden has been reported to have used (yesterday on TV it was mentioned several times)?
Would commerce grind to a halt if we didn't have anonymous remailers? Of course not. The same with PGP and SSL and other crypto technologies that are available to everyone.
The fact is, crypto as we know it is a luxury. It didn't even exist ten years ago. None of the crypto tools we use did. We can hardly make a case that banning or restricting access to them will send us back into the stone age.
Please, let's end these spurious arguments that providers of crypto tools are no different than the people who make the metal in the airplane wings. There's a big difference, which anyone with an ounce of sense can see. Banning airplanes is not an option. Banning crypto is.
Of course commerce as we have it today would "grind to a halt" if "we" didn't have crypto, for any value of "we" that includes me as a private individual. When you say "we" you exclude the banks, the bureaucracies, big business. You think it is fine for them to use all these wonderful things, but not for the rest of us. You are suggesting that it is wrong for me as a private person to make use of the accumulated knowledge and work of programmers like myself; but OK for me in my capacity as an employee of a multinational corporation (which I used to be) or the Inland Revenue (which I also used to be - hey! I was the taxman! I admit it!). So if I put on a suit and get my old job back, then *you* can't use the tools that I would every day? This does not compute. And your "ten years ago" is a bit off. Thirty years ago I would have had to go to a counter at a bank to get my own money out as cash, and I would have had to have had a recommendation from a Respectable Person to have had the account in the first place. By the time I first went to university, 25 years ago, all I had to do was stick a card in the wall. As you bloody well know, the entire ATM system depends on crypto (if not that well implemented, see Ross Anderson, passim) This is basic stuff. You know all this. It's been obvious for years Most of the "money" in the world is just bookkeeping entries in databases in computers (mostly here in London & in New York of course - quite a few were in the vicinity of WTC - I assume they had backups). You bet that needs crypto. When I first worked with mainframe computers in the 1980s we used tapes for money transfer to the banks. Crypto paid my wages, literally. My ability to pay the rent next month was a little bit of text on a 9-inch tape. That was one job any sysprog would be happy to work late to get through. Now it is all online and I hope the systems are better... Of course that wasn't "crypto as we know it". Things change. Deal with it. In another ten or twenty years there will be other sorts of crypto. Or are you banning R&D as well? Anyway, as you also know if you have been paying any attention at all, the laws they pass in your country (whichever that might be) won't even stop your own neighbours from using crypto if they want to, never mind all us nasssty little foreigners. We've got the genie, you can bring the bottle, where is the cork? Ken Brown
participants (7)
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cubic-dog -
Declan McCullagh -
Greg Broiles -
Howie Goodell -
Ken Brown -
Nomen Nescio -
Yeoh Yiu