tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) said:

Julian Dibbell's excellent article that appeared in the "Village Voice" (August 3rd, cover story) is the *cover story* as well in the latest "Metro" newspaper, the free San Jose area paper (but we get it down here in Santa Cruz as well).

Over lunch yesterday I was telling a friend (who had previously exhorted me to find folks on the net more appropriate than sci.crypt to discuss crypto schemes with) about discovering cypherpunks, and on our way out he noticed this Metro issue, commenting "Zeitgeist." Quite. :-) It quotes Tim, btw: You can get further away in cyberspace than you could in going to Alpha Centauri", says Tim May, and he should know. Before he retired seven years agao, a wealthy man at age 34, May was a reasonably illustrious corporate physicist. Now he's a Cypherpunk, part of a loose-knit band of scrappy, libertarian-leaning computer jockeys who have dedicated themselves to perfecting and promoting the art of disappearing into the virtual hinterlands. Concentrated in Silicon Valley but spread out across the country and as far away as Finland, the Cypherpunks maintain daily e-mail contact, collaboratively creating and distributing practical software answers to modern cryptography's central question: How to wrap a piece of digital information in mathematical complexity so dense that only literally astronomical expenditures of computer time can breach it? "Some of these things sound like just a bunch of fucking numbers," May explains. "But what they really are is they're things which in computability space take more energy to get to than to drive a car to Andromeda. I'm not kidding. I mean, you can work the math out yourself." Well, no, you probably can't, but even those unversed in rocket science can appreciate the social value of such calculations... And Eric: "Cryptography is a greater equalizer than the Colt .45," says Eric Hughes, the long-haired, cowboy-hatted and not entirely lapsed Mormon who, along with May, conceived the Cypherpunks just seven months before the Clipper hit the fan. "These are power-leveling techniques," he adds, pointing out that the hermetically sealed voice-and-data channels that could arm every citizen against state wire-surveillance are just the simplest of the crypto toys the Cypherpunks are playing with. Nicely provocative article. Doug -- Doug Merritt doug@netcom.com Professional Wild-eyed Visionary Member, Crusaders for a Better Tomorrow Unicode Novis Cypherpunks Gutenberg Wavelets Conlang Logli Alife HC_III Computational linguistics Fundamental physics Cogsci SF GA VR CASE TLAs