That reminds me of my first reaction to CypherPunks: why would the government spend thousands of $$$ of supercomputer time & mathematician brains to see your miserable piece of information, when all they have to do is lock you up at the back of a countryside garage, beat the shit out of you, inject various chemicals into your blood until you spit out your secret key ?

Because of economics and political stability. You can build computers and monitoring devices in secret, deploy them in secret, and listen to _everything_. To listen to everything with bludgeons and pharmaceuticals would not only cost more in labor and equipment, but also engender a radicalizing backlash to an actual police state. Of course, if one is paranoid, these considerations of the whole do not hold, since for only one person the cost balance is reversed. There is safety in numbers. Eric

On Wed, 26 Jan 1994, zaaaaaaaap! wrote:

Nobody ever speaks of them chemicals that make you talk. But they exist, and as well as cryptography techniques developed fast recently, trust the government, those chemicals must have made a few advances. Like, for example making you tell what you don't want to and then make you forget about anybody asking.

The effects of the classic truth drug thiopentale (Pentotale) are widely known by anesthesiologists and their nurses, although other drugs with faster elimination (meaning you can drive your car home after some ours) are replacing it as drug of choice for anesthetic initiation. If you inject a sub-anesthetic dose of Pentotale the subject will become loose in his associations and frequently offer his deeper feelings about the situation to the audience (in the operating theatre) without being asked to do so. Pentotale and other barbiturates have also been used in special psychiatric treatment programs to induce loquaciousness and emotional openness (at the moment very out of fashion). Most of these effects are not very different from those of alcohol, we all know the overfriendly wino, and can certainly be withheld by a determined non-talker. The same goes for benzodiazepines (like Valium). But you usually do forget a lot about it afterwards. Amphetamines can also make the subject very, very friendly but not against his will and you don't forget about it. Opiates obviously are bad choices making the subjects carefree but uncooperative. Anti-depressives and anti-psychotic drugs also have no theoretical advantages. Some hallucinogens might be better choices though, at least as weapons of torture making you talk just to be spared the next shot. Publically known hallucinogens like LSD are well known to produce states of ultimate terror if given to uncooperative subjects at the 'wrong' time. True hallucinogens like (high dose) atropine might be even more effective. Many synthetic psychodelic drugs started their career in anesthesiology but were quickly abandoned because of psychic side effects. One of the weirdest is still used sometimes (being extremely friendly to weak hearts and lungs): ketamine. Basically the patient on ketamine can be awake during the operation but in a state of utter confusion through selective disruptions of associative brain channels. My educated guess is that if serious work is going on trying to find a truth drug, ketamine-related substances are studied intensely. Anyway, there is no perfect drug that just make you say the truth and then forget about it. And there never will be. And the polygraph is quackery. Mats Bergstrom