Cypherpunks and terrorism

Ken Brown k.brown at ccs.bbk.ac.uk
Fri Sep 14 04:11:52 PDT 2001


Nomen Nescio wrote:

[...]
 
> 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.

Of course commerce as we have it today would "grind to a halt" if "we"
didn't have crypto, for any value of "we" that includes me as a private
individual.    When you say "we" you exclude the banks, the
bureaucracies, big business. You think it is fine for them to use all
these wonderful things, but not for the rest of us.

You are suggesting that it is wrong for me as a private person to make
use of the accumulated knowledge and work of programmers like myself;
but OK for me in my capacity as an employee of a multinational
corporation (which I used to be) or the Inland Revenue (which I also
used to be - hey! I was the taxman! I admit it!). So if I put on a suit
and get my old job back, then *you* can't use the tools that I would
every day? 

This does not compute.

And your "ten years ago" is a bit off. Thirty years ago I would have had
to go to a counter at a bank to get my own money out as cash, and I
would have had to have had a recommendation from a Respectable Person to
have had the account in the first place. By the time I first went to
university, 25 years ago, all I had to do was stick a card in the wall.
As you bloody well know, the entire ATM system depends on crypto (if not
that well implemented, see Ross Anderson, passim)

This is basic stuff. You know all this. It's been obvious for years Most
of the "money" in the world is just bookkeeping entries in databases in
computers (mostly here in London & in New York of course - quite a few
were in the vicinity of WTC - I assume they had backups). You bet that
needs crypto.  When I first worked with mainframe computers in the 1980s
we used tapes for money transfer to the banks. Crypto paid my wages,
literally. My ability to pay the rent next month was a little bit of
text on a 9-inch tape. That was one job any sysprog would be happy to
work late to get through.  Now it is all online and I hope the systems
are better...

Of course that wasn't "crypto as we know it".  Things change. Deal with
it. In another ten or twenty years there will be other sorts of crypto.
Or are you banning R&D as well? Anyway, as you also know if you have
been paying any attention at all, the laws they pass in your country
(whichever that might be) won't even stop your own neighbours from using
crypto if they want to, never mind all us nasssty little foreigners. 

We've got the genie, you can bring the bottle, where is the cork?

Ken Brown





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