NSA Insecure Remailers?

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

A >probably only the NSA and some defense agency we haven't
A >yet heard of are actually performing this analysis right now. But 
A >given the declining price of storage media, even saving everything on
A >magnetic media and paying $1000/gig, it only costs about US$8.7 million
A >to keep a year's worth of traffic headers around (media cost).
A >
A >So what?

So what indeed.

Why oh why do we waste so much time seeking systems that are 
mathematically unbreakable.  You don't need mathematically unbreakable 
systems to have a free market on the nets.

It costs a minimum of $50K to start a federal criminal prosecution (that 
is if the perp is inside the US).  This means that the feds can only 
afford a few tens of thousands a year.  When you add incarceration costs 
it quickly becomes very difficult.  This being the case, they are 
dependent on your obedience for law enforcement success.  Like any 
predator, the government must gain more energy from the kill than it 
expends on the hunt.  Otherwise it weakens and dies.  

Did you know that fewer than 1000 people are convicted of federal tax 
evasion every year.

Your obedience is in turn dependent on your view of whether or not 
obedience is right and on your fear of punishment.  Quite apart from 
computer networks both the ideology of obedience and the fear of 
punishment have been declining.  Net society further weakens both of these 
factors.  

The consensual hallucination that is rule by others seems more threadbare 
every year.  The DDR border guards had the machine guns to fire on the 
crowds at the Berlin Wall on 10 Nov 1989.  It was not mechanical failure 
or a magic shield that prevented them from firing.  It was simply because 
a change had occurred in the minds of the citizenry (and in their own 
minds).

Sure the feds can nuke your house.  Would that gain them anything?  It 
would cost more than it was worth.  What they can't do is sit down next to 
every person on earth (or on the nets) and intimidate them.  In the past 
it didn't matter because almost everyone was a peasant bound to the soil. 
 As you keep piling technology and market opportunities (choices) on 
individuals, their power increases.  Governance of others is hard enough 
when those governed are weak.  It rapidly becomes impossible as they gain 
strength.  

Today and in the future, those who "move like Gods through cyberspace" 
will be much harder to control particularly since such controls will 
depend not on guns but on them convincing us that we are not free.

DCF

"They would not leave him alone." -- The first line of what relevant work 
of fiction?
--- WinQwk 2.0b#1165