Re:quote of the day

[hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)]

>That reminds me of my first reaction to CypherPunks: why would the government
>spend thousands of $$$ of supercomputer time & mathematician brains to see
>your miserable piece of information, when all they have to do is lock you up
>at the back of a countryside garage,  beat the shit out of you, inject
>various chemicals into your blood until you spit out your secret key ?

Because of economics and political stability.

You can build computers and monitoring devices in secret, deploy them
in secret, and listen to _everything_.  To listen to everything with
bludgeons and pharmaceuticals would not only cost more in labor and
equipment, but also engender a radicalizing backlash to an actual
police state.

Of course, if one is paranoid, these considerations of the whole do
not hold, since for only one person the cost balance is reversed.

There is safety in numbers.

Eric