Ian Grigg writes at http://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000381.html: : FC exile finds home as Caribbean Brit : : Vince Cate (writes Ray Hirschfeld) created a stir a number of years ago : by relocating to the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla, purchasing a : Mozambique passport-of-convenience, and renouncing his US citizenship : in the name of cryptographic and tax freedom. : : Last Thursday I attended a ceremony (the first of its kind in Anguilla) : at which he received his certificate of British citizenship. : : But Vince's solemn affirmation of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, her : heirs and successors was done for practical rather than ideological : reasons. Since giving up his citizenship, the US has refused to grant : him a visa to visit his family there, or even to accompany his wife to : St. Thomas for her recent kidney surgery. Now as a British citizen he : expects to qualify for the US visa waiver program. : : Is this the end of an era, a defining cypherpunk moment? "Cypherpunk" responds in the comments:
I never saw this kind of thing as being central to the cypherpunk concept. In fact, to me it seems like the wrong direction to go. The point of being a cypherpunk is to live in cypherspace, the mythical land where online interactions dominate and we can use information theory and mathematics to protect ourselves. Of course, cypherspace is inevitably grounded in the physical world, so we have to use anonymous remailers and proxies to achieve our goals.
But escaping overseas is granting too much to the primacy of the physical. It would be better for Vince Cate and other expats to help create anonymizing technology and other infrastructure to allow people to work and play freely in the online world.
And tying it back to this blog, the gold at the end of the cipherpunk rainbow is a payment system which can be deployed and exploited anonymously. That's hard, for many reasons, not least because most people are happy and eager to share information goods for free. Modern-day online communism (creative commons, open source, etc) actually undercuts cypherpunk goals by reducing the need and motivation for anonymous payment systems. How can you buy and sell information goods online, when everyone gives everything away freely?
Someone writes:
I never saw this kind of thing as being central to the cypherpunk concept. In fact, to me it seems like the wrong direction to go. The point of being a cypherpunk is to live in cypherspace, the mythical land where online interactions dominate and we can use information theory and mathematics to protect ourselves. Of course, cypherspace is inevitably grounded in the physical world, so we have to use anonymous remailers and proxies to achieve our goals.
This seems reasonable. It seems the path of least resistance here, is to let ones meatspace identity fly under the radar, and attract no attention to itself, while ones cypherpunkish persona is fighting injustice and sovereign state arrogance by selling really great tech to the needy and wiring large satchels of money between continents in encrypted untraceable transactions. I would think the last thing one would wish do to in order to further that goal, is to have ones meatspace identity publicly thumb its nose at the government, and make itself a target for retaliation. Loudly renouncing ones citizenship is a lot less effective in destroying the infrastructure of oppression, than anonymously telling everyone in the world how they can make a 20 megaton thermonuclear explosion working for a few years in their basement using only non-radioactive materials that can never be made illegal to own. There are two types of societies in the world. Those in which everyone has a deadly weapon that can never be take away, and against which there is no defense. And those in which everyone has an inpenetrable shield that can never be taken away, and against which no weapon is effective. Dolphins are an example of the former. Usenet is an example of the latter. Dolphins are polite, friendly, and respectful of eachother, and no group of dolphins can ever form a government to oppress the rest of them. We should try to be more like dolphins in cypherspace, while attracting as little attention to ourselves in other places. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
On 2005-03-06T00:03:01+0100, Anonymous wrote:
Ian Grigg writes at http://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000381.html: : Is this the end of an era, a defining cypherpunk moment?
It doesn't make much sense to renounce your U.S. citizenship if your relatives, who you care about and who you want to visit, still live there. What did Vince Cate expect? He wants to be free to enter the U.S. temporarily, but doesn't want to be a citizen of a country the U.S. deems sufficiently similar to itself? From the American State's perspective, he is dangerous. He is a near-anarchist, and individuals with that kind of status threaten the existence of the U.S. -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936
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