To: cypherpunks@toad.com

From Thursday's WSJ news that suggests that the competition may be a tad busy to worry about suppressing strong crypto:

Poor Man's Cruise Airliners Can Exploit U.S. Guidance System But So Can Enemies --------- Global Positioning Satellites Could Be Used to Direct Cheap, Accurate Missiles ---------- Defense Aide:It's a Quandry Washington--At the Pentagon, they call it "the poor man's cruise missile." It is a low-flying guided missile or robot aircraft that is relatively cheap to produce, but capable of hitting targets with a precision the U.S. once monopolized... (you can fill in the rest of the story) Reminded me of the late 60's early 70's with VonuLife and the gypsies and the troglodytes arguing that high-tech weapons would render large cities (aka target-rich environments) uninhabitable and people would have to spread out into communities too small to waste hardware on. Also, Vinge's "The Ungoverned" in which tornado-killer missiles are retargeted at the government baddies. This is an example of what I call the Sack-Full-Of-Cats-Thrown-In-The-River effect. As things get dicey for large "target-rich" institutions like governments, and their revenues drain away to the nets, internal and external struggles for fading influence begin. It ends up like a sack full of cats thrown into a river. Noisy, but fun if you don't like the cats. Duncan Frissell Who likes cats himself and could almost feel sorry for the rulers of others if they hadn't quite killed so many people. "In his first three months in the White House, President Clinton killed more people in the United States than during the 12 years of Reagan-Bush." --- WinQwk 2.0b#0