National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption

[Paolo Da Ros]

At 07.54 11/08/96 -0400, you wrote:
>Forwarded by Robert Hettinga
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>X-Sender: amehta at giasdl01.vsnl.net.in
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 10:17:31 +0600
> To: cypherpunks at toad.com
> From: Arun Mehta <amehta at giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
> Subject: Re: National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption
>   Technology
> Sender: owner-cypherpunks at toad.com
> Precedence: bulk
>
>
>At 02:05 10/08/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
> >At 12:15 PM 8/10/96, Scottauge at aol.com wrote:
> >>I was watched CBS reports a couple nights ago about how all these blue
collar
> >>and now white collar jobs are going across seas.
> >
> >Where do I begin? First, what does "taking jobs away from us" mean? That we
> >own these jobs? And who is "us"?
> 
> Well said. 

Sure. jobs belong to people which are the more competitive to perform them
(which ask less to do the some job or ask the same to do a better job).
Since markets are going to be "global", as a consumer or a reseller I can
buy wherever I want whatever I want -well, almost, and crypto, remailers etc
can help-. 
The improvements in the competitive position of US economy have one of their
roots in the loss of purchase power by the american workforce (less to do
the same job, or the same to do a better job).
This is something I guess Germans are going to experience.
In Italy there is an old tradition of using devaluation as a competitive
mean (ask the french government and french industrialists what they thought
after the IT Lira lost 30% in  a few months, back in 1992-3).  

> 
> >>So a possible way to protect jobs is to protect the knowledge on how to do
> >>them.

I don't think it's possible to "protect jobs". This translates into blocking
the market mechanisms, which constantly, by mean of the competition, push
toward better quality, lower prices and/or new products. Right or wrong,
market wins. If ideas are worth money, they spread.

To confirm the simmetry of politics on the two sides of the pond, I was told
the US right (newt gingrich) has on this issue the same idea here in Italy
is supported by the far left (the Rifondazione Comunista party). The idea is
to make mandatory a label on every third world product which states the
amount of child labor embedded in the product. 
I see in this "moral" approach to economy two possible outcomes: the first
is that nobody buys such products, (the goal of the proposal) based on child
exploitation (and so the child is not exploited anymore, and starves to
death while smiling to his first world "friends"); the second is that lots
of people buy the product not because of its features, price etc, but to
help the poor child. In this way, the moral approach to economic issues has
two immoral possible outcomes (I enjoy these paradoxes, it's one of the few
things I still like of Marx).

The problem is that there are millions of hungry people, and a simple
solution is not available. Who says he has it is a liar.

> 
> To some extent this happens automatically -- for instance, if you
> live in the Silicon valley, your knowledge levels are higher on
> account of higher frequency of user meets, conferences, etc. But,
> to the extent you use the Internet as an information source, it
> is available internationally. So you cannot have it both ways:
> use an open forum like the Internet, and hope to keep knowledge bottled in.

The only choice we first world citizens have is to run faster, try to invent
new products or new ways to produce old products.  I have been told that the
quality of eastern europe programmers is very high, and we cannot compete
with people which makes one tenth or less than we do (well, we CAN compete,
if we accept to make the same...).

BTW, from the very little I know about some members of this list, it looks
like they are "creme de la creme": very bright people, wide vision of the
issues, eclectic culture (at least two of the brightest of them share my
love for LISP machines, so my ego gets comforted...), and constant research
of the best market position for themselves. Unfortunately, individuals can
easily switch and try to improve their position, national economies have a
far bigger momentum to win to achieve the same result. Besides, if everybody
could so easily switch, the improvement -a higher relative position- could
not exist at all.

> 
> In earlier generations of computing, monopolistic organizations
[snip]
> projects such as Iridium, Odyssey, Teledisc and Globalstar
> threaten to change all this, little impact will be felt until the
> end of the decade. In any case, telecom facilities in the
> industrialized countries will most likely continue to be
> considerably superior, providing workers there with an ongoing
> competitive advantage.

This is an extra-optimistic view. In  one of my previous job at a very large
European system integrator, three years ago, I was told that "SW projects
used to be 7 years long, are 7 months long, and we shall prepare for the
moment when they will be 7 days long". So workers there will have a
competitive advantage (perhaps) at doing a shrinking amount of work. 
Given their age, many members of the list are accustomed to shrinking
markets and new skills acquisitions (see Artificial Intelligence back in the
80s), as is possible to understand from the fact that they are positioned in
one of the hottest spots in one of the fastest growing markets. So I assume
many are familiar with the job-kiling role of technology. The competitive
disadvantage of industrialized countries workers is provided by these
workers themselves when they put competitive advantage of their know-how in
new products or technologies.


> 
> Further, as economists such as Paul Krugman point out, developing
> countries lack the means for sustained growth ("Which Asian
> Model?", Newsweek, November 20, 1995). Those economies that have

I wouldn't trust a newsmagazine on such a critical topic. And (hope you
don't take this as a chauvinistic european statement) expecially NOT an
American newsmagazine. Nice photos, poor content.

> shown dramatic growth, such as the East Asian, have relied
> essentially on low-cost inputs, rather than on their efficient

If you know how many are the chinese, you could come to the conclusion that
as soon as they improve their agricolture, HUNDRED MILLIONS low-cost people
(input?) are available to exploit new markets. So, low cost input shortage
is not an issue.
Yes, their economic model could reach a critical point when they reach, say,
a 6K$ gdp pro capita, but by then their gdp should be 1.200.000.000 * 6.000
US$, i.e. 7.2 trillion US$. (today their GDP pro capita should be around
900US$, i.e 1.08 TrnUS$, growing at 10% per year)

> utilization. Professor Alwyn Young of Boston has in fact come to
> the surprising conclusion that Singapore's total factor

very surprising indeed. If I'm not wrong, singapore has a GDP pro capita
around 12K$. And productivity is what defines the GDP. Should productivity
in Singapore really be so low, I can't understand how capital intensive
industries (semiconductors, for instance) could have been established there
by so well managed western companies like HP or TI etc

> productivity (which measures such efficiency) is so poor as to be
> comparable to that of the Soviet Union. He points out that "at
> just the time that everybody was ranting about how magnificent
> Japan was, it ceased to catch up."

Well. yen was at 300. Now it is at 108. It means that to buy -say- fine
Californian Wine -apart from customs, which is an issue, of course- a few
years ago a japanese blue collar had to spend -say- 2 hours. Now 40 minutes
(the example is not very good, but should explain my thinking).

> 
> Cheap inputs is not a long-term phenomenon, as companies looking
> for good programmers in India are increasingly discovering.
> Programmer salaries in India are rapidly rising. While many
> youngsters are keen to become programmers, India lacks adequate

the real killer here is technology, not low-cost programmers from India.
All the recent emphasis on Intranets is emphasis on a dramatic
standardization of everyting; GUI, security, infrastructure, access to data
etc. Standardization means better productivity, and productivity is "less
people to do the same job".


[snip]
> >>Perhaps there is a larger picture in the world that the cyperpunks mailing
> >>list is missing.  That cryptography is not just for personal privacy, but
> >>could involve job security also - as a matter of fact, the income base for

Job security doesn't exist. There used to be in eastern europe, but it
didn't work. Job security output were Trabants (funny east german cars) or
poor quality state restaurants.

> >>this whole country.

I think the picture is far larger than that of the simple right to the
privacy. You don't care of your privacy when your stomach is empty, and
there is too much people with his stomach empty. So, many things will change
as many poor people become richer and many middle(or low) -income people
become poorer. 

I think one of the things which will have an impact on this change is going
to be the net, and crypto is a net-enabler (uno of the most important, I
would say). So, cypherpunks are going to be exposed to all the important
things to happen. I don't think they alone will be in the position to change
nothing, but they will bring an informed point of view in the discussion.

I once dreamed to change the world, or at least to control the way things
had to go. Now the situation is so complex that I could feel satisfied just
being able to understand what's happening and how we will face change. My
enrollment in this list is because lots if bright people submit ideas on the
topic here, and this is of the greatest value.

> 
[snip]
> 
> My prediction is that with the blessings of the Internet, the
> next generation of multiracial programmers, even those that were
> born in the USA, will be more likely to be found on the beaches

I'm not sure there will be something like "the next generation of
programmers". Not in the sense world is going to end, but in the sense that
possibly, in the new world which is coming to birth in these years, there
will be no need of programmers (but a few hundreds of them...).


> of tropical islands than in the fog of San Francisco. When you
> can work in the shade of a palm tree, even if you should earn
> less, it's worth it :-)
> 
> Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta at cpsr.org
> http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/  finger amehta at cerfnet.com for public key
> 
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------
>The e$ lists are brought to you by:
>
>Take Your Business Online with Intertrader Ltd, Edinburgh, U.K.
>Visit http://www.intertrader.com or email info at intertrader.com
>
>Making Commerce Convenient (tm) - Oki Advanced Products - Marlboro, MA
>Value-Checker(tm) smart card reader= http://www.oki.com/products/vc.html
>
>Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion
>http://www.hyperion.co.uk                    info at hyperion.co.uk
>
>See your name here. Be a charter sponsor for e$pam, e$, and Ne$ws!
>See http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ or e-mail rah at shipwright.com
>for details...
>-------------------------------------------------
>
>