A Psychopunk's Manifesto

[an12070@anon.penet.fi (T.C.Hughes)]

                   A Psychopunk's Manifesto

                        by T.C. Hughes

Honesty is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.
Pseudospoofing is dishonesty.  A pseudonym is something one doesn't
want the whole world to know, and anonymity is something one
doesn't want anybody to know. Pseudoanonymity is the power to selectively
reveal oneself to the world.  

If two thieves have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of
their interaction.  Each criminal can confess about their own memory of
this; how could anyone oppose it?  One could criticize laws against it,
but the freedom of collusion, even more than pseudospoofing, is fundamental to
a criminal; we seek not to restrict any criminality at all.  If many
criminals speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the
others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other
parties.  The holes in the Internet  have enabled such
group collusions, and it will not go away merely because we might want it
to.

Since we desire black markets, we must ensure that each party to a
transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary
for that transaction.  Since any information can be spoken of, we
must ensure that we reveal as little as possible.  In most cases
personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a
store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. 
When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages,
my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying
or what others are saying to me;  my provider only need know how to
get the message there and how much I owe them in fees.  When my
identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction,
I have no secrecy.  I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must
_always_ reveal myself.

Therefore, pseudospoofing in an open society requires pseudoanonymous transaction
systems.  Until now, cash has been the primary such system.  A
pseudoanonymous transaction system is not an honest transaction system.  A
pseudoanonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when
desired and only when desired; this is the essence of criminality.

Honesty in an open society also requires identification.  If I say
something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it.  If 
the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no
privacy.  To speak is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to
speak on the Internet is to indicate not too much desire for
privacy.  Furthermore, to conceal one's identity with assurance when
the default is True Names requires the Internet.

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless
organizations to grant us embezzlement out of their beneficence.  It is to
their advantage to repress us, and  we should expect that they will
try.  To try to prevent their restrictions is to fight against the
realities of cyberspace. Evil does not just want to be free,
it longs to be free.  Criminality expands to fill the available
storage space.  Criminality is Conspiracy's younger, stronger cousin;
Criminality is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and
understands less than Conspiracy.

We must defend our own conspiracy if we expect to have any.  We must
come together and create systems which allow pseudoanonymous transactions
to take place.  People have been defending their own conspiracies for
centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret
handshakes, and couriers.  The technologies of the past did not allow
for strong conspiracies, but electronic technologies do.

We the psychopunks are dedicated to building pseudoanonymous systems.  We
are defending our criminality with cryptography, with anonymous mail
forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic
money.

Psychopunks write code.  We know that someone has to write software
to defend criminality, and since we can't get perverted unless we all do,
we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow
psychopunks may practice and play with it. Our code is barred for all
to use, worldwide.  We don't much care if you don't approve of the
software we write.  We know that software can't be destroyed and that
a widely dispersed system can't be shut down. 

Criminals deplore regulations on criminality, for criminality is
fundamentally a private act.  The act of corruption, in fact, removes
information from the public realm.  Even laws against conspiracies
reach only so far as a nation's border and the arm of its enforcement.
Criminality will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with
it the dishonest transactions systems that it makes possible. 

For a conspiracy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract.
People must come and together deploy these systems for the common
evil.  Secrecy only extends so far as the collusions of one's
accomplices in private.  We the psychopunks ignore your questions and your
concerns and hope we may deceive you so that we do not get caught
ourselves.  We will not, however, be moved out of our course because
some may disagree with our goals.

The psychopunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for
criminality.  Let us proceed together apace.

Onward.

T.C. Hughes
<satan@soda.berkeley.edu>

16 Nov 1993

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