Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19

[Anonymous]

Let's look at some real-world metric of cpunkish issues:

1. Surveillance and data harvesting.

The main reason many "joined" cpunks (including me) was the issue of wide-spread surveillance and sophistication of data harvesting that computer networks enabled. I could protect my traffic no problemo. And I couldn't care less if some moronic consumer/sheeple type could not. That was not the issue. The issue was that government(s) (there used to be more than one in old times) had too good take on the pulse of the population, and would make less mistakes due to this feedback.

Well, they succeeded and cpunks miserably failed.

There was no way to jam the crypto down the throats of the unwashed. Today most of them keep their e-mails and http pages on disks that belong to LEA-friendly corps - there is no need to intercept - all TLA needs to do is search.

There is more data harvesting today than ever before. It's not even mentioned any more. It's not a news item or a sexy maillist topic.

2. Crypto tools

Widely available. This is a big success. One can readily download PGP or ssh.

Seldom used. I don't count "protect-your CC # with SSL" kind of use.

Only NSA knows, but I'd guess that the number of PGP users is pretty stable in the last decade. The biggest win of the government was removing surveillance from the focus.

My guess is that all the early fuzz about crypto tools was fear that they will be widely used. When it became obvious that it will not happen the fuzz stooped.

ECHELON? ITAR? No one even bothers to mention these any more. But you can safely assume that *all* mail traffic through MAE nodes is archived, along with google queries and that most net users have "files" with histories of search strings and similar. I would be disappointed with the waste of my tax dollars/euros/pounds if this is not the case.

The only way out is new communication technology. Internet is too old and has been completely coopted. We need the Next Thing, now. I don't know what it is but these things seem to come up quite regularly.

So forget about Internet doing anything for the cpunk agenda. Tune in the Next.