At 9:52 PM 11/7/1996, Huge Cajones Remailer wrote:

Look around at all the laws in a community that are unenforceable and largely ignored by significant sections of the community. Taxes are a classic with many people receiving cash and not declaring it..I suppose you could say they just opt not to pay taxes while law abiders (to varying degrees) opt in to pay tax.

I agree. It would be necessary to marshal widespread public support to eliminate strong crypto. If the Four Horsemen scenario is available, this support would be available.

It is estimated here where all dogs, for example, are required to be registered, that only 40 percent are in fact registered (ie pay the dog tax). The authorities simply do not, with their current technology, have the ability or political will to break down everyone's front door and complete house to house dog searches then deal with court cases and bring eveidence as to the actual owner of the animal where this is a relevant matter to be proved.

Sure, it's not really worth the effort. How much effort will you go to prevent your children from being kidnapped?

Consider the difficulty of actually outlawing say PGP and making it stick. To ban its use on a network compliance measures such as routine traffic scanning would be implimented. So users may say resort to direct modem to modem systems thus forcing authorities to routinely tap telephone calls, identify modem calls, and analyse these calls. The authorities start to use scarce resources provided by those members of the public that choose to pay taxes to them.

In the case of a largely compliant public, this isn't all that expensive.

The authorities have to spend even more resources on publicity and scams to align privacy advocates with terrorists. Some privacy advocates may even become terrorists who before didn't really care for such tactics.

This is a highly likely scenario. But in the scenarios proposed by the GAKers, even the privacy advocates would be reluctant to defend crypto.

Assume the snail mail route is effectively sqaushed what then? Well you could voice call your friend and read the encyphered text to them over the phone and they could then run it through pgp and decrypt it. If the authorities effectively made this too costly (in terms of risk etc) then you could always just jump on a plane and tell them the message personally or send someone else to do that for you.

Gee, I hope you don't have to send many messages if you have to travel across the country to deliver them. How will you operate an anonymous business this way? It doesn't sound like cryptoanarchy to mean.

The costs of compliance increase as the authorities take measures to put the genie back in the bottle. Stealth versions of popular programs get released, and further technological advances are made so that the problem becomes greater with respect to compliance as do the costs to the taxpayer of ensuring compliance. Encrypted data that cannot be easily distinguished form noise would require routine analysis and attempted cracking of every bit of data transmitted..a task that would soon bring even the great US economy to its knees assuming the people didn't put a stop to the madness before it reached that point.

I think people probably would put a stop to the madness. But, under the Four Horsemen scenario, most people, even Mr. Huge Cajones Remailer, would not consider it to be madness.

Just as an aside, I am sure the various spook angencies in the 'free world' are well aware of these issues and no doubt other issues I have not imagined and such considerations have played a part in so far stalling an outright ban on the use of effective encryption programs and devices.

This is interesting. I would be quite interested to see real evidence that various spook agencies have been foot dragging on the GAKers plans.

There are always costs to a government in the reduction in freedoms, and the ultimate cost to any particular government is that it may stir the beast so much that it awakens and takes away that governments authority whether by democratic means or otherwise.

Yes, this is correct. Peter Hendrickson ph@netcom.com