Official Anonymizing

[John Young]

Thanks for the cites of Gatti.

Greg's disclosure of C2Net's sales is appreciated. Perhaps not
surprising. What would be surprising, maybe, would be disclosure
as ZKS did in its earliest days, of reporting on meetings C2Net was
having with law enforcement officials about its technology. Those
admirably exceptionable ZKS reports then stopped, at least I didn't
see them after the first few. What I got instead was a rush of 
advertising from ZKS. Fair enough, as far as business 
development goes.

Those singular souls working at ZKS in the cpunk spirit, are 
what makes me especially interested in the firm's welfare, in 
the light of its original goal to make available to the public 
quite strong privacy protection and anonymity tools. 
A plan pretty close to the exciting, customer-appealing
marketing method outlined by Greg.

The ZKS original model did indeed have an anti-authoritarian
streak. And presumbly the products live up to that promise.
And that is all they do.

If ZKS has only explained the technology to the LEAs and
sold them the same products as the public gets, then great.
And has not been persuaded to do a bit of dirty work as well
out of sight of the cpunks. End of concern. Buy its products, 
invest in it, make the hard workers rich.

Still, there is the PGP market model to ponder. And no believable
disclosure from Phil why he left, what was done to PGP he
could not bear to be a part of so took his settlement and
skipped his obligation to his supporters to disclose fully.

There is food for thought in why some people leave government
service and companies rather than continue to participate
in deceptive practices, though often still bound by secrecy
agreements and NDAs. I believe that a good bit of the earliest
public revelations of cryptology came from such people, as
did and does most secret technology used for intrusion
on private lives.

Diffie hints at being nudged or noodled toward PK by thoughtful
researchers. Today there are a host of ex-members of intel
agencies telling and warning what they can without being
jailed.

One recurring theme of those who have worked inside the
world of secrecy is how that world has been corrupted by
excessive secrecy. And historians regularly write of
the corrupting influence of secrecy in government.

Undercover law enforcement agents are domestic spies,
dreaded secret police in other nations, no matter what spin 
is put on the need for such operations to fight crime, and 
they pose a greater danger to civil liberties than the spooks 
and military from whom they have acquired techniques and 
technologies devised to combat foreign enemies.

This is the crux of the homeland defense demonology, as
in times past with other internal demons: government officials
treating the citizenry as the enemy within and running secret
operations as if intelligence and military operations -- indeed
utilizing the resources of those powerful institutions by way
of inter-agency agreements to avoid violating law.

The Defense Science Board concluded in the Summer of
2000, in particular in its legal recommendations (a panel
chaired by ex-NSA counsel Stewart Baker) that it was
time to change law prohibiting domestic operations by
intel and the military, that this change is needed to combat
domestic terrorism and for "protecting the homeland."

The DSB report in two parts:

"Protecting the Homeland"

  http://cryptome.org/pth.htm  

"Defensive Information Operations"

  http://cryptome.org/dio/dio.htm 

Painfully ironic is that "protecting the homeland" is a 
siren sung by every government, left, right and center,
which sees its citizenry as the enemy and argues 
the need for secret police, urges citizens informing 
on each other, runs secret courts, and generally
stigmatizes anti-government conduct, yes, and
speech.

Anybody who continues to argue that AP was not
used to convict Jim Bell, and that a crackdown on 
speech, not merely conduct, is not underway, lives 
in a bubble of ignorance or privilege. Or, more likely,
is peddling deception as successful businesses ever
must do after reaching maturity and youthful promises
peter out.