[Moderator's note: This is quite long, and much of it is interesting primarily to those following the Sealand saga. Since many of us _have_, in fact, been following the Sealand saga, I'm forwarding it for that reason. --Perry] Quoting Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam@ai.mit.edu>:

I never thought much of the idea at the time. In todays climate I suspect that E-Gold, ZeroKnowledge and Sealand might as well start packing up their servers before they get busted.

(it's "HavenCo" not "Sealand", just as ZKS is ZKS and not "Canada") I agree the current climate is substantially worse, in terms of respect for the rule of law, individual liberty, and the prospects for freedom of speech, than it was before the WTC bombing. However, none of this was unanticipated; this incident just accelerates our descent into a future dystopia of universal monitoring, global statism, and individual subjugation, but does not at all affect where we're going. We've been on this path for at least the past 50 years, and if this attack and the aftermath pushes us forward another 20 years in a single day, that's certainly important, but no one should be surprised when they look around themselves and don't like what they see. (I assume you mean legislative/legal/political climate; while the nay-sayers said we'd be out of business before the end of 2000 due to lack of demand, HavenCo at least is profitable, and I think E-Gold is as well.) This trend is far more damaging to firms whose core business is not the provision of anonymity and privacy to clients, but which require privacy and anonymity provided by others to make their services useful. If it becomes more difficult to provide privacy/anonymity/security, the demand for such services will increase even faster than the costs of providing them. Some firms with relatively weak technical or other basis may be unable to scale up to provide more secure solutions, but the ensuing vacuum will encourage others to step up to the plate. The greatest enemy of secure electronic mail, for instance, being widely deployed is the LACK of widespread monitoring. If every internet connection in the US were monitored actively, and the contents were routinely used in civil and criminal legal actions, technologies like ZKS Freedom, PGP, SSL would be in far wider use than they are now. Certainly an argument can be made that it is more complex to offer such services with active government prosecution in one or more jurisdictions around the world. However, certain fundamental technical conditions do not cease to be true simply due to terrorist action, political will, or legislative fiat. Blowing up the WTC is unlikely to have made factoring RSA any easier than it was on 10 September, it is unlikely to have found a backdoor in widely deployed symmetric ciphers, and it has not affected the laws of thermodynamics to lessen the difficulty of defeating steganography. Sure, identifiable persons, physical assets, etc. can now be more easily attacked through legal means, at least in most of the world, and there is public support in many countries for international military action against others, provided at least a tenuous link to the "global terrorist conspiracy". However, the fundamental game is not changed. All that is required for "cypherpunk" reality is: [*] at least one computer with secure local execution environment (processor, some internal secure memory for interim results) [*] some means of permanently storing data (which can be unreliable, monitored, etc.) [*] some means of communication (even highly monitored, maliciously modified, or other) to the humans involved [*] plus, for anything reasonable, multiple such setups and some means of communication among them in a large network, even monitored or modified, with traffic analysis possibly limited to "a member of the overall network" where "network" can be massively more broad than "conspirators"). [*] Code[1]. I think it highly unlikely even a new "War on Terrorism", even if 100 times more forceful than the "War on Drugs", will be able to eliminate every last pre-2001 laptop computer, PDA, etc. from the earth, or the ability for people to send email (even if monitored, and outright encrypted email is a capital crime) and connect to a global network. On top of that infrastructure, viable electronic cash systems protected from traffic analysis and resistant to censorship, anonymous publication systems, etc. can be built. Indeed, most of the technical challenges have been solved since the 1980s; the only difficulty has been general lack of demand from the public, standard software engineering complexity issues, excessive concern for legality and intellectual property concerns, and the distraction of the dotcom boom. If, as you seem to imply, open warfare on personal liberty shall be declared, most of those concerns go away; if it's a felony to deploy ecash, you'll want to be anonymous anyway, and then violating someone's patent just doesn't seem like a big deal in comparison.

[...]

Sealand will probably still keep maintaining its idiotic claim to be an independent state, but if the UK government wants to search they can easily get a warrant. If sealand were outside UK territorial waters (it ain't anymore) the navy can board at any time of their choice any structure or vessel that is not registered with the shipping registry of a recognised state that is in international waters.

Sealand's claim to statehood rests on the following argument: 1) An artificial island, Roughs Tower, was constructed in 1942 by the British Government in then international waters, for the purpose of defense. This island was not constructed for the purposes of extending the UK's territory, but only to defend the UK's mainland from air or sea attack. 2) Subsequent to cessation of hostilities, WWII, 1945, the UK removed personnel and some equipment from the island, abandoning it. The UK did not return to the island at any subsequent point. 3) In 1966, Roy Bates, a UK citizen, along with others, landed on Sealand and occupied it. It was at this point abandoned for over 20 years by the UK government. Roy, his wife Joan, and son Michael established permanent primary residence on the island, renaming it Sealand. 4) Through repeated legal challenges, including firing on ships of the royal navy, mounting armed counter-invasion, resolving the issue of taxation of UK citizens resident on Sealand as if they were resident in any other foreign country, etc., Sealand's sovereignty has been repeatedly reaffirmed. We have a large body of supporting documentation from the past 59 years; I'll try to put more of it up on our website in the future. 5) Despite the UK extending territorial waters in 1987 to 12nm, Sealand was by that point established for more than 20 years, and extended its own territorial waters to 18nm the day before. Similarly, treaties and amendments to the laws of the sea in the 1980s prohibiting the construction of platforms in international waters by sovereign governments in order to extend territorial waters did not apply to the UK in 1942, nor did they apply to Sealand when founded in 1966. Such treaties also support the long legal tradition of artificial and reclaimed land being treated as land for the purposes of international and national law. None of this has been in the least affected by an apparent new willingness on the part of the US and other nations to invade arbitrary other nations. Sealand has nothing to do with any of the recent terrorist events; if Osama bin Ladin were, for instance, living on Sealand, I would fully expect Sealand would be asked to turn him over[1] or face invasion. Sealand's legal status is NOT the issue; international realpolitik of larger states vs. smaller ones is much more the issue. In fact, given such a situation, it seems more likely they would treat Sealand as a state, and ask us to comply with a demand placed in such language. Independently of that, HavenCo operates. If HavenCo/Sealand is shut down by invasion by the nation of -------, HavenCo can continue to operate from other locations; indeed, eliminating Sealand would simply establish more need for our services and ensure our next facility has more customers and capital equipment than Sealand. [1] There *was* a time where cypherpunks wrote code, rather than worrying about influencing legislation; they assumed the government was malicious and all powerful anddesigned technical systems to defeat them still; I don't think that time is over. Indeed, an upcoming conference, CodeCon, exists to advance the state of the art in and promote discussion of such systems; CFP to be sent shortly.) [2] Which would be done, but in multiple boxes/bags/jars, just as our ultimate response to someone presenting a clear military threat unless we hand over a given customer machine is to destroy it completely and then refund the customer's unused balance. -- Ryan Lackey [RL7618 RL5931-RIPE] ryan@havenco.com CTO and Co-founder, HavenCo Ltd. +44 7970 633 277 the free world just milliseconds away http://www.havenco.com/ OpenPGP 4096: B8B8 3D95 F940 9760 C64B DE90 07AD BE07 D2E0 301F --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@wasabisystems.com