What, Me Worry?

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

To: cypherpunks@toad.com

From Thursday's WSJ news that suggests that the competition may be a tad 
busy to worry about suppressing strong crypto:

Poor Man's Cruise
Airliners Can Exploit
U.S. Guidance System
But So Can Enemies
  ---------
Global Positioning Satellites
Could Be Used to Direct
Cheap, Accurate Missiles
  ----------
Defense Aide:It's a Quandry

Washington--At the Pentagon, they
call it "the poor man's cruise missile."

It is a low-flying guided missile or
robot aircraft that is relatively
cheap to produce, but capable of hitting
targets with a precision the U.S. once
monopolized...


(you can fill in the rest of the story)


Reminded me of the late 60's early 70's with VonuLife and the gypsies 
and the troglodytes arguing that high-tech weapons would render large 
cities (aka target-rich environments) uninhabitable and people would have 
to spread out into communities too small to waste hardware on.

Also, Vinge's "The Ungoverned" in which tornado-killer missiles are 
retargeted at the government baddies.

This is an example of what I call the 
Sack-Full-Of-Cats-Thrown-In-The-River effect.  As things get dicey for 
large "target-rich" institutions like governments, and their revenues 
drain away to the nets, internal and external struggles for fading 
influence begin.  It ends up like a sack full of cats thrown into a river. 
Noisy, but fun if you don't like the cats.

Duncan Frissell

Who likes cats himself and could almost feel sorry for the rulers of 
others if they hadn't quite killed so many people.

"In his first three months in the White House, President Clinton killed 
more people in the United States than during the 12 years of Reagan-Bush."


--- WinQwk 2.0b#0