Cypherpunks and terrorism

[Nomen Nescio]

James Donald writes:
> Obviously this catastrophe could not have taken place without the
> unauthorized use of paper.   Paper allows people to communicate
> dangerous ideas and secret messages.
>
> With paper, anyone can communicate to large numbers of people at
> once, even if they are not properly authorized or in authority.
>
> The solution is clear.  Paper must be a government monopoly .
> Paper should only be used for government forms and official
> government statements. 

Many people have made this point, but it is so fundamentally wrong that
it's hard to believe that anyone takes it seriously.

Paper, and metal, and knives, and airplanes, and all the other things
which have been compared to anonymity tools, are different in one major
respect: it would be an inconceivable hardship to ban them.

They all have important uses for other things than committing crimes.
To ban paper or airplanes or knives would eliminate all those other uses.
Imagine a society without paper.  It could not function.  Likewise,
eliminating those other technologies would at minimum cause tremendous
harm to everyone's lives.

Can we really say the same thing about cryptography?  About steganography
tools?  About the anonymous mail services which bin Laden has been
reported to have used (yesterday on TV it was mentioned several times)?

Would commerce grind to a halt if we didn't have anonymous remailers?
Of course not.  The same with PGP and SSL and other crypto technologies
that are available to everyone.

The fact is, crypto as we know it is a luxury.  It didn't even exist ten
years ago.  None of the crypto tools we use did.  We can hardly make a
case that banning or restricting access to them will send us back into
the stone age.

Please, let's end these spurious arguments that providers of crypto tools
are no different than the people who make the metal in the airplane wings.
There's a big difference, which anyone with an ounce of sense can see.
Banning airplanes is not an option.  Banning crypto is.