White House letter

[ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu]

Hello, I think the official cyberpunk White House (Pres. Bill Clinton)
letter would be a great idea, although my experience is that the more
you want to say, the more people will say "that's not for cypherpunks
to say" or "I don't agree with that as a cypherpunk" and that it will
be hard to build consensus. But, on the other hand, a lot of
cypherpunks are kind of extremists that may even say some things don't
go far enough.  Anyway, here are some possible topics, as bland as I
can make them (but are all actually highly controverial):

1. Off the tip of the mailing list's tongue, phone encryption
particularly in cellular and hand-held phones.  The recent article from
the Sunday Times posted here stated that

> Despite the changes, it will be still
>virtually impossible for any amateur eavesdropper to intercept calls made
>on the digital mobile phones.

Hm, that's pretty questionable. Maybe we shouldn't make it a black and
white issue, but codes seem to me to be either broken or unbroken, and
the former is insecure and unusable whereas the latter is not.  There
are already examples of situations where lack of encryption led to
outrageous breaches of privacy--both Princess Diana and her previous
husband can attest to that!

Clinton could put pressure on intelligence agencies in the U.S. to
allow strong encryption for cellular phones, pass laws, or whatever,
and eventually commit to security in phone calls.  What do you think,
cypherpunks?  Should the government be allowed to wiretap "at all"?  Is
it a "right" of the government? (prepare for the flames)  Should we
insist on completely unlimited use of cryptography?  Is any other
scenario practical?  Is anything but this inevitable? (uh oh, some
opinion creeping in there)

Introduction of strong cryptography in hand-held phones could be *the*
stepping stone for widespread introduction of cryptography, if the
battle is won and becomes publicized enough.  I think if this was
painted in the right way, we could really get a lot of public support
for ideas like "I should be able to know when someone is listening to
my calls" or "I should be able to protect from that" or "I know when
somebody opens my mail, why not my phone calls?" or "that's not
something I want my government to be doing anyway".

2. The new national network NREN supported by the NSF will have massive
data communications capabilities, many times the bandwidth of the
current internet.  There are plenty of "guidelines" that could be
established on its use.  For example, how about commercial traffic? 
Are there restrictions on traffic?  I think the "new world highways"
analogy works here. While we can get and go on a highway whenever we
want, and carry loads up to certain reasonable restrictions, we have to
get licensed. Also, commercial companies rely on them heavily and our
economy is immensely dependent on them (they benefit it immensely). 
Should we oppose all taxes and licensing? Limitations on total traffic
permitted?  Believe it or not, these will become *hot* issues soon. 
Bigger than the time the FCC was thinking of taxing modem use.  Keep in
mind, we might be able to make arguments that the ideas like "volume"
are somewhat obsolete in terms of networks, in which in many cases
sending very large amounts of data is as costly (or even less so,
because of overhead) than sending smaller amounts.  Even if someone was
charged based on quantity of use, the actual money involved would have
to be something like $.0001/meg (I hope).

3. There are lot of restrictions and regulations on networks right now.
 For example, there are rules that prevent telephone companies from
providing "information services" over telephone lines, apparently
originating by rather bold but successful cable company lobbyists. 
Should these be removed?

4. Fiber optics will be penetrating into a lot of homes over the next
few years.  This will be related to the network expansion mentioned
above.  Should these be maintained and installed by private companies? 
Should there be limitations on the size of the companies running the networks?

5. In the letter, we should look at trying to explain our interests and
backgrounds.  Who ARE we to ask these things?  A bunch of teenage
computer geeks and hackers?  Computer professionals with a serious
interest in privacy, with important tax-paying jobs?  I don't really
know the answer to this one!

I'd be willing to hammer up some rough drafts, if no one objects, but
we need to hash this out, and decide about some kind of voting
procedure, I would say (majority passing? line-item veto?)

I suppose the one really major consensus of the cypherpunks is the
commitment to cryptography and the believe that it should be
unregulated and freely used.  So, if all this sounds too involved, we
could go the simple route and just fix up Eric Hugh's group charter to
send to Pres. Clinton.

ltr.



P.S. Here's a product that would *really* bring the issue of
cryptography to the forefront, making the public aware of it and
partial to it, and is just waiting to be invented by somebody with a
flair for electronics, packaging, and marketing.  Encryption technology
is becoming pretty inexpensive, and even some simple techniques are
better than nothing and not trivial to get around for the big
bureacracies that do wiretapping.  Imagine a single little plastic cup
that could be placed over a phone reciever with all the cheap
encryption electronics built in (maybe even analog based).  Market it
in every drugstore and discount store in existence in real flashy ways.
 Protect your calls! Just slip it on your phone! Use it to talk to your
friends! etc. introducing the CRYPTOCUP only $9.99.  The thing could be
adaptive, like pick one of 10 or 100 preprogrammed codes when it finds
another of the same at the other end of the line.  Or, maybe some
one-time PADs could be used by the users using touch-tones.

You could even market it as a child's toy: imagine that the kid could
slip it over his mouth and yell through it.  Another kid with a
receiving speaker could decrypt this into earphones or something.  Now,
to other kids on the playground, all they hear is goofyspeak that
sounds like pig latin from the pair, but the two kids are able to talk
about throwing snowballs at Suzy or whatever (endless laughs and
hilarity).  You could have all kinds of spiffy TV commercials with
little kids pretending to be spies, with the costumes and everything.
Wow!  You could sell a LOT of these if it was done right.  This would
be like the 20th century equivalent of the cups-and-string thing. 
(Just make sure I get plenty of royalties :)

Or how about this?  For us cypherpunks, the "kids toy" thing could be
little cover for the use that it was *designed* for: use over phones. 
The "kid toy" thing would just be a way to get it to be widespread so
that everybody had one and knew what it did.  Then, the rumors would
start. Wow! They fit on phones!  Drug dealer's use em!  People having
affairs use 'em!  Businessmen use 'em!  EVERYBODY uses em! Coach to
team player: did you remember your CUP?  Yes Sir!  Coach starts yelling
plays at quarterback.  Girlfriends would ask their boyfriends to slip
'em on before they started (do you have the PROTECTION with you?).
Then, we take over the world. HAHAHAHA <- evil laugh

If this was cheap enough, people might buy it just for the novelty of
it.  Especially if you don't have to choose the code, just slip it on
and it works (maybe with the better versions, you could pick the code).
 The point is, infiltrate the economy to the point where any kind of
silly regulation of "cryptography" would be perceived as completely
ridiculous by the general population.  "What are we going to do?"
They'd say, "register every kid's CRYPTOCUP?  HAHAHAHAHA!" <- side
splitting laugh at the sheer stupidity of government.  (Yeah, we have a
great one---once they even tried to regulate CRYPTOCUPS! HAHAHAHA! <-
now sides starting to hurt)

OK (regaining my composure and sanity), so if we're really boring, I
suppose we could go the route of just pressing for encryption in
cellular phones.  Or maybe just the middleaged employed people on the
group could go that route, and all the teenage hackers work on the toy.

P.S. how big is cypherpunks now anyway?  I'm interested in embarrassing
myself in front of as many people as possible. :)