Why I'm Not Writing Impassioned Essays in Defense of Crypto and Privacy

[Tim May]

When I see the calls for giving up the Fourth and First Amendments, the 
calls for backdoored crypto, the claims that Cypherpunks must put on 
"CypherAngels" red berets and join Curtis Sliwa and the San Francisco 
Police Academy in using their skills to narc out evil persons who choose 
not to escrow their diaries with the local and federal police, I am 
nauseated.

(I have written half a dozen posts suggesting some of these people 
simply be killed by any means possible, but I have deleted most of them 
before sending. Frankly, I see a war coming and I see that hundreds of 
thousands of "them" need to be exterminated. But I digress.)

I don't have the desire, energy, or patience to write the kinds of 
essays I wrote in 1992-95 (and even earlier, 1988-1991, before the 
Cypherpunks list). I wrote then about the implications of privacy, about 
the First and Fourth Amendments, about the technologies that were 
inexorably changing the landscape of fhe world. A lot of others did as 
well.

(I guess I'm sort of glad, for nostalgic reasons, that my friend Eric 
Hughes wrote his "elegiac" piece...except I fell asleep after a few 
paragraphs of the Kennedyesque say-nothing-but-say-it-eligiacally 
article. Note to Eric: get some fire back in your belly, boy! This is 
war, and I don't mean war against some Arabs.)

Newcomers like "Nomen Nescio," "Aimee Farr," and "chefron" are now 
whining about what some of them call "moral crypto" and are calling for 
"cooperation" with the government. Sort of like "moral hotel rooms," 
where every hotel videotapes room activities and "only shares when 
government shows a good reason." Or like calls for "ink escrow," where 
potential subversives, and everybody in fact, escrows their journal and 
letter writings just in case O'Brien feels a need to look at the 
writings of Lucky Green, Winston Smith, or Tim May.

Feh, this is well-trod ground.

Why am I not writing impassioned defenses of crypto? Because it was all 
said back in 1992-3 when the Clipper issue arose.

(Clipper was leaked in April 1993. Very longterm subscribers may 
remember that I took an article written by Dorothy Denning (yes, _that_ 
Denning!) to likely mean a proposal was being considered to require 
government backdoors for all crypto. I wrote an artcle for sci.crypt 
entitled "A Trial Balloon To Ban Crypto?" which generated something like 
500 responses on the Usenet, plus discussion on the brand-new 
Cypherpunks list and the Extropians list. This was in October 1992, 
almost 9 years ago. Deja/Google does not go back this far, nor do the 
Cypherpunks archives currently on the Web. But, I assure you, this 
happened.)

I lack the patience to re-write the defenses of privacy and crypto I and 
others wrote so many years ago. I have probably averaged a few posts per 
day for 9 years, or, perhaps ten thousand or more posts. Some were just 
followups, but many launched threads. Perhaps 100 or so were major 
essays. Whatever, if I have not said it by now, a few more posts to try 
to convince Aimee Farr (who seems to read nothing of past discussions) 
or "chefron" or "Nomen Nescio" will obviously not make a difference. The 
2001 debate is shaping up to be just a super-fast-forward version of the 
1993 debate.

Frankly, I have lost patience in many ways. I think most _active_ 
enemies of liberty should simply be killed. Lined up against the wall if 
there are ever trials, or killed en masse in their dens if necessary. 
Nothing is to be gained by arguing with them.

I don't care if newbies to the issue are "put off" by my lack of 
patience. Others can play the role of high school teachers explaining 
the basics of the Constitution. And the archives exist, even if not all 
the way back to 1992-5. My own Cyphernomicon exists, from 1994, in 
(apparently) enough pieces that even the New World Order cannot stamp it 
out.

The new Ludlow book, "Crypto Anarchy, Pirate Utopias, etc." (title 
similar to this) has some articles written by several of us that are 
better than anything we could write from scratch to use in argument with 
"chefron:" and "Nomen Nescio."

Finally, I have finally received the proof copy of my chapter in Vernor 
Vinge and Jim Frenkel's long-delayed re-issue of "True Names." My 
chapter is entitled "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy" and makes my 
strongest case. Unfortunately, I wrote the chapter several years ago, 
expecting publication by 1998 at the latest. The project was delayed and 
delayed and then I heard nothing and then it was announced and then 
delayed and...you get the picture. Jim Frenkel is urgently seeking minor 
corrections, with the final contract FedExed to me a few days ago, just 
in time to get caught in the WTC grounding! Talk about irony.

I really don't care if Nomen Nescio and Jim Choate and Agent Farr like 
or dislike what is inevitably coming. It is coming, and millions will 
pay the price for their criminality. Hundreds of millions more will 
learn what freedom means.


--Tim May