Re: Crisis Overload (re Electronic Racketeering)

[Bolivar Shagnasty <tj@compassnet.com>]

Originally sent to list during server failure:
---------------Included Message---------------

Perry Metzger wrote:

>"Robert A. Hayden" writes:
>> We've seen the enemy, that the are the 535 senators and representatives 
>> in D.C., and the staff in the White House.  It's time to shore up our 
>> allies and enter the battle witht he best weapons we have; information 
>> and popular use.
>
>As unpleasant as the congress is, it isn't the enemy. The governmental
>forces desiring control are not the same as the congress.

This is true.  IMNSHO we are witnessing yet another case of the 
representation of an illegitimate constituency.  Grassley is not representing 
the people of his state -- he is representing and carrying water for federal 
government interests.  While some people used to acidly refer to "The Senator 
from Texaco" and such, it is a much more common situation that some Senators 
and Representatives represent federal agencies in matters before their 
chamber that virtually NO VOTER would ever think of or could even discover as 
a matter of personal interest.  You can be sure Cathy Cornflower of Cherokee 
didn't start this by writing Grassley and suggesting that RICO be expanded to 
cover distribution of non-GAK crypto.  It is inconceivable that more than a 
tiny handful of Grassley's constituents would even recognize anything in his 
bill if stopped on the street and asked about it.

Agencies develop "friendly" congresscritters like the Soviets used to develop 
"friendly" journalists and politicos.  It wouldn't even be all that 
surprising if similar methods are used.  The "friendlies" take obscure and 
no-so-obscure issues before their house on behalf of the agencies.  At some 
level this is probably necessary, but with all those folks getting comfy with 
each other up there in Disneyland-on-the-Potomac, it's impossible that unholy 
alliances do not develop.  The "us vs them" mentality of a congresscritter 
grows to encompass all three branches under "us" and views the unwashed 
masses as "them."  In that view the suit from XYZ who comes over to confer 
with the staffers is "one of us."  He gets right in (while visiting 
constituents wait stupidly for an appointment that the elected official will 
be -- we're so sorry -- unable to keep).  He's bringing up an issue of 
concern to "us."  "We" have a problem that needs to be fixed by modifying 
para (a) of sec (3) to read "shall" instead of "may."  "We" will feel very 
important and may even win some special stroking or quid pro quo for fixing 
"our" problem.

The one real flaw in this is that the electorate was just left out of the 
loop, and kept in the dark to boot.  When the elected official went into "we" 
mode he ceased representing the people who sent him there.  In these 
increasingly totalitarian times it's likely his representation was 
distinctly CONTRARY to the interest of those who sent him there.

There have been cases of agencies approaching "their" congressman and having 
completely new language inserted in a conference bill -- language that was 
never in the original, never offered as an amendment until the bill from each 
house went to conference, and never debated when the conformed bills returned 
for final vote.  It's the norm that such maneuvers go completely unreported 
in the media.

>Congressmen are by and large harried and ignorant people. They have no
>idea what any of this is about. We have the choice of letting Louis
>Freeh do all the educating, or having a white shoe Washington PR firm
>do some of the educating, too. I favor the latter approach.

There is also something that is almost always overlooked... taking names.  It 
is possible to "pull on the string" and follow the visible event back to the 
less immediately visible actors.  The congresscritters, though by and large 
harried and ignorant, are not always guiltless.  At best they are willing 
agents for little bits and pieces of the fabric of overweening statism.  In 
every case, though, there are faceless staffers who may also be harried but 
are usually NOT ignorant.  The staffers are often the ones who "sell" the 
congresscritter on signing onto this or that non-voter issue for this or that 
self-serving political reason.  Staffers also include the people with huge 
political axes to grind -- people who gravitate to the positions of writing 
the text of the bills that translate the generality to which the elected 
official has acceded into excruciatingly detailed and usually 
confusing legislative language.

There's a relatively small number of really activist people in government, 
and not all of them are public and visible.  It's possible that some 
congresscritters could be defeated with the aid of dissemination back home of 
information on the non-voter issues they've championed and concise 
explanations of how many of those issues work to harm their voters.  It's 
also possible that some of those faceless staffers could be turned into 
liabilities by focusing some light on them, thereby reducing their 
effectiveness and employability.

>This is not to say that we shouldn't be widely deploying crypto -- we
>should. (Of course, offshore sites will always have crypto available,
>but...) 

It would seem that the U.S. may lose a number of good minds who may prefer to 
live and write code in other parts of the world.  This has been a developing 
trend for other reasons, and now people who like to write crypto will have 
another reason to look for a new home.

>This is also not to say that Congress doesn't pass very bad laws.

Name a good one!

>However, I very, very strongly urge that we not assume that nothing
>can be done. Just winning a couple years time could totally alter the
>landscape.

Your urging is appropriate.  It's odd, though, how the country seems to be 
pulling itself in two diametrically opposed directions:  On the one hand the 
electorate shifted significantly in the '94 election, responding with greater 
enthusiasm than even the new young Turks in Congress seem to fully 
comprehend, and seeming to be fed up with too much government, prepared to 
commission the dismantling of federal bureaucracy and getting government the 
hell out of their lives.  On the other hand we see bold and impressive moves 
on the part of politicos and bureaucrats toward a suffocating, draconian 1984 
police state.  We have even heard increasing choruses of "Just following 
orders" and "Just doing my job" from mindless hatchetmen these last few 
decades -- bizarre and incredible echos of the excuses offered in post-WWII 
war crimes defenses.

The country cannot move strongly in these two directions for long: Something 
has to give.  The longer this division persists, the greater the gulf that 
stretches between and the more "interesting" the times that will result when 
one side prevails.  The side that prevails will consume the side that fails 
with an intensity related to the energy built up in the process.

Crypto is presently on the periphery of the larger schism, though it's 
conceivable that twenty years in the future it would be clearly understood by 
most people to be central to privacy in an information age.  The moves to 
head crypto, and thus privacy, off at the pass are being made now, though, in 
an effort to prevent a future in which large numbers of people understand how 
to maintain privacy when everything is a bit stream. 

If there is a critical and unique difference between this and other 
seemingly similar situations it is the 10-15% monthly growth of the Internet, 
something that is orders of magnitude greater than what humans are accustomed 
to perceiving, estimating, handling, coping with.  If recent figures are 
accurate, 7,500+ new web pages have been created in the 33 hours since this 
thread started here and perhaps 100,000 new people are on the net in one way 
or another.  It's unlikely that Grassley or Exon or Leahy can assimilate all 
the implications of that rate of growth.  "Senator, the blob is at the door!" 
 "Well, call the State Police!"  "Uh, sir, they're at least three hours away. 
 In that time the blob will be larger than the State of Idaho!"  

The politicos have never before dealt with a sizable "throwaway minority" 
whose current growth curve intersects the U.S. population curve in 24 months 
and the world population curve in 4 years.  In a couple of days there are 
more new people getting on the net worldwide than are contained in a U.S. 
congressional district.  Partly as a result, there are issues getting 
attention that would have easily been contained just a couple of years ago by 
the policy of benignly overlooking them.  No longer.  If a net mobilization 
was disappointing last month, try it this month and see the difference.  
Movements that took years to form and grow decades ago take days or weeks 
now.  Soon they will take only hours.  

We are just now cresting the big one on the supercharged roller coaster of 
high tech infoplosion, and as the velocity rapidly builds there will be 
profound shock among the old and the slow.  Even the savvy will be surprised. 
Push this medium for all it's worth.  Find ways to promote informed privacy 
as a ground-floor issue for newbies and get them to have a knowledgable, 
vested interest in it.  Get people onto the net.  One new person today is 
four or five people a year from now, 15-28 people two years from now.  Since 
a lot of it spreads from person to person, new people start with tools and 
concepts they get from others, so the initiation of a new netparticipant as a 
privacy-aware crypto user tends to spawn subtrees of new users in the same 
mode.  Use the growth multiplier to outflank 'em while they're noodling.

Would it be more productive to hire the white shoes or start another few ISPs 
and shepherd the new users to be privacy-aware letter writers and faxers?  
Educate your ISPs.  Any ISP that isn't political in this age is brain 
dead and dead weight.  Any ISP that sees its political interests as somehow 
different than those of its users (recent lobbying to shift burdens away 
from national services and onto users, and recent AOL admissions of 
participation in what sounded like entrapping users) is worse than brain dead 
-- it's part of the problem.

Bolivar