Getting Back to our Radical Roots

[Kent Crispin]

On Fri, Jun 20, 1997 at 10:17:37AM -0700, Tim May wrote:
[...]
> 
> But nearly anyone connected with a corporation will probably be told to use
> a GAK product, to reduce potential liablility and criminality concerns.
> This is the scenario Whit Diffie outlined several years ago at a
> Cypherpunks meeting, that pressures would be applied so as to make
> corporations and other such organizations the main enforcers of such
> policies.

The mistake here is thinking that corporations need pressure. 
Instead, corporate authority structures are substantially equivalent
to government authority structures, and the same desire for control
that drives GAK operates within corporations.  Thus, corporations are,
underneath, eager accomplices, not covert champions of the cypherpunk
agend angrily bowing under pressure. 

> (No, there won't be 100% enforcement. But enough to have a chilling effect
> on the development of some infrastructures Cypherpunks would like to see.
> Certainly any sort of untraceable cash infrastructure will be in almost
> immediate violation of the M-K bill, as it will be in U.K,, Germany,
> France, Japan, and all the other OECD/G8 nations. Cypherpunks like us can
> still "bootleg" some untraceably transactions, but not easily. And forget
> about wide use. This is the desired effect of these new laws.)

Yep, that infrastructure will be chilled.  
[...]
> We need to stop treating Cypherpunks meetings as marketing arms of
> corporations, however "friendly" to us in some respects, and get back to
> our more radical roots.

Actually, I think we need to be more clever than that.  

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent at songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html