Hum, well, I always kind of thought May felt/wrote that some dis-assembly of the state was inevitable given the possibility of strong crypto, and even in China I would maintain that there's already enough computer power+anonymity that encrypted communications can/will occur. (Remember, China is BIG...as big as the mainland US plus Alaska, and much of it far less accessible...and let's not forget that there are areas the size of Western Europe where Han dominance is not particularly appreciated.) I tend to agree, though that the bootstrapping process can be greatly retarded in the presence of a heavy police state....but above a certain threshold it can unfold quickly. What I wonder if whether W and his buddies were up late drinkin' one night and figured out that we were nearing the threshold you speak of, a threshold they believed they had to save humanity from. I mean, what if just anyone could send any message they wanted without their government listening in? Someone's gotta be in charge, after all, and it better be us and not the ragheads 'cause God loves US and plans on sending all of them to hell unless they see the error of their distinctly non-American ways. -TD

From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv@cdc.gov> To: "cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net> Subject: RE: Symantec labels China censor-busting software as Trojan Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:45:00 -0700

At 09:45 AM 9/15/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:

...

Hum. Seems the Chinese government is pretty effective at self-preservation. Does this contradict the widely-held Cypherpunk belief in the inevitability of deterioration of the state?

"We" have always held that a sufficiently policed state can defeat crypto. If the RIAA could put a vidcam in your computer room, things are easy. If crypto is illegal, things are easy. (We have remarked on how, modulo stego, crypto traffic is trivial to detect with any entropy measure. Got PGP headers?)

China is a police state. A state with freedom of expression ---which does not include much or all of Europe--- is less so. China is also a nukepower, so it is likely to persist.

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