Well, we knew that this had to happen eventually. Isn't it ironic that, as we read that crypto is flourishing in the Soviet Union, that their supreme court has just accepted the validity of digital signatures, we find ourselves under attack here at home! Seems like we're putting up walls just as fast as they are tearing them down over there. I just sent e-mail to those crypto developers in the Soviet Union; maybe I'll get a visit from the Thought Police. After all, I did mention RSA, IDEA, and PGP in the message, and there's not much doubt the bad guys monitor the link to the Soviet Union, now is there? In fact, everyone who has a public key on the key servers could be a suspect. This crackdown can serve no legitimate security purpose, since the algorithms involved are all readily available worldwide. This can only serve two purposes: (1) to intimidate any company which might consider publishing useful cryptographic software and information, and (2) to establish a precedent and set up the machinery for a drug-war-style crackdown on all privacy and digital speech. Why is the government so reluctant to treat digital media as equivalent to paper media? Real simple. Paper requires an organization to distribute it. If the government really wants to, they can conduct a Gestapo raid and confiscate everything (Steve Jackson Games) and prevent the publication of anything on paper. With electronic media, they can't do anything. Once it's on a disk or on the Usenet, information is forever beyond their control. The government is about to lose all control over information, and the idea scares the hell out of them. What is happening is that the network is replacing the hierarchy as the basic unit of human organization. Naturally, those who run the hierarchies don't want this to happen. The bad guys have been trying to figure out what to do since PGP was released. Being leftover cold warriors, they really don't know how to attack freeware distribution. The idea of free distribution of information is totally alien to them. But as soon as commercial sales were mentioned, they knew what to do. Yes, we should fight them tooth and nail on this one, but we should also learn a valuable lesson from it: they can't handle freeware! It's only when we go commercial, with a visible base of operations, that they know how to attack us. We need a method of zero-knowledge collaboration on software development. People could work together on a project without knowing anything about each other. This would involve a newsgroup for discussion of projects, anonymously of course, and the exchange of pseudonymous PGP keys. Private mail would be sent by posting with the recipient's key id in the subject, making it easy to grep for. Development could be broken up among different people, functions and code fragments could be posted and exchanged, and the whole program compiled and released, in such a way as to be totally untraceable. Code we need now! Windows NT, OS/2, and UNIX implementations of PGP, set up as a server so that any application can access PGP primitives. This would establish PGP as a standard encryption server outside the US. People use what is easy, so make it easy. A program to transparently encrypt hard drives on the fly, similar to KOH or Norton Diskreet (except don't use DES, and allow only part of the drive to be encrypted, like Diskreet), to protect people against unreasonable search and seizure. Let's face it, with the drug war, the Constitution's search and seizure protections are DEAD! They may not be able to prosecute you based on illegal evidence, but they can take everything you own and keep it until you are broke and homeless. A tape backup program which securely (IDEA or similar) encrypts streaming tapes. This would protect people from seizure of their records and archives. Government loves to seize paper; give the bastards something they can't read! The next few weeks and months may be decisive. This is it. If we succeed, we could have a future of freedom, privacy and equality brought about by the inherently democratic nature of networks in general and public key crypto in particular. A world in which digital cash has starved the dinosaurs of government and digital media have made censorship forever impossible. But, if we fail: "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." -- 1984 BTW: when setting up encrypted remailer bounces, be sure to change the subject at every bounce to defeat traffic analysis based on the subject line being the same all the way through. For example: :: Request-Remailing-To: <put address here> Subject: <put new subject here> Be careful, write code, spread PGP, we might actually win this thing!