One of the problems commenting on long thoughtful posts is the number of hooks, and limiting oneself to just a few. [delete lots of interesting stuff]

... After all, the Soviets couldn't stop samizdats, the Chinese couldn't stop fax machines, and the Americans can't stop drug use, so what hope is there in controlling modems, crypto, cellular phones, satellites, Web links, stegonography, terabytes of data flowing unobstructed across borders, and so on. Just to "stop the Net" would disrupt the entire financial system, which not even Clinton or the next (Republican) President would be tempted to do....they might as well launch a nuclear war as try to shut down this "anarchic" ( = high dimensionality) system.

Well, I certainly hope so. But let's remember Poland in 1979, where "they" were desperate enough to shut down the entire phone system. It gained them only an extra 10 years of control, but it cost the Poles a *lot* of misery. But "samizdat" raises an interesting economic issue around security. The Soviets paid just enough attention to the circulation of hand-written or typed copies to make sure people spent a lot of time and energy at it -- time and energy not spent on more obviously dangerous activity. Compare the volume of Solzenhitsen's output before and after exile [let's not debate quality]. That didn't mean samizdat wasn't subversive and long-term dangerous -- but it was very expensive and absorbing to dissidents and potential dissidents. But that's the situation cypherpunks [and friends :] want to put our hypothetical eavesdroppers [government or corporate] in. Not exactly harmless, but spending a lot of time and energy being concerned with the chasing multiple carbon copies of samizdat novellas.

* Alternative Nets, like FIDONet, are often lost in the discussion of "the Net," but perhaps we should take much greater interest in these alternatives. They make a crackdown harder, they lessen the dangers of a single-point attack, and they provide "genetic diversity" for building future Nets. (I'm not saying Cypherpunks have the time, expertise, or incentive to work on this, but just reminding folks that the Internet is not the end all and be all...)

I find that techno-illiterate Greens have very little trouble understanding FIDONet -- it's the kind of small-scale organizing within larger networks that a lot of progressive activity has always followed. They find it very hard to believe that other kinds of techie nets are really secure in the long run. It is, in fact, the level of activity that the Poles reverted to without the phone system ...

Personally, I think there are fewer long essays and analyses for the same reason there are fewer large predators than grass-munching herbivores.

--Tim May

Geez, I have enough trouble getting card-carrying Greens to use and/or develop good ecological metaphors without some crypto-anarcho-libber punk muscling into the territory! ;-) =================================== Rich Dutcher, San Francisco Greens P.O. Box 77005, San Francisco, California 94107 USA "That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves." Kim Stanley Robinson, "Green Mars" Greens, of course, only enslave plants - so weed-whackers work better than cops ... ====================================