Re: Crypto Exports, Europe, and Conspiracy Theories

[tallpaul@pipeline.com (tallpaul)]

I missed Tim's post of Jan 24, 1996 23:18:21, where he wrote, among other
things:: 
 
 
> 
>Once one has good encrypted links, including access to a variety of 
>offshore sites,  remailers cannot be stopped. The TLAs may not like them, 
>and the courts may rule that a remailer site is strictly liable for 
>misdeeds which impinge on its remailers (I'm not convinced this is so, but

>no matter), but what do U.S. courts have to say about Dutch remailer
sites? 
>What will the Fifth Circuit be able to do to hactic.nl? Or chains of 
>remailers that pass through Norway, Japan, Estonia, Italy, and Lower 
>Slobovia? 
> 
 
My dystopian sense leads me to believe that there will be an international
treaty banning them. 
 
I speak to some agricultural-utopians today who believe the world's
problems can be solved if hemp is legalized. They describe the process
where it was made illegal. Essentially one individual in the government,
"Drug czar" Harry Anslem (?) whipped up a global hysteria and got an
international treaty passed against the hemp trade. 
 
I suspect the hysteria over the Four Horsemen is already more extreme
internationally than Anslem's hysteria ever was. 
 
I see two strategies existing over issues of anonymity/remailers/etc. 
 
The first is the elite one (and I do not use the word in a derogatory
sense.) It focuses on a limited number of remailers, located in different
countries, and all internationally known. 
 
The second is what I call the "mass strategy" (and I hope that the
libertarians on the cypherpunk list do not treat the word in a derogatory
sense). 
 
Luckily for all of us the two strategies are in no way mutually
contradictory. If anything they tend to reinforce each other. 
 
I see PZ's development of PGP as the first development in the mass
strategy. Before PZ, quality crypto was limited to monarchs and
bureaucrats. After PZ, the same (or even superior) crypto was made
available, both technologically and monetarily, to almost everyone in the
world. 
 
Linux was another mass strategy development. 
 
So was the development of new replaceable 100+ Mb drives likes those from
IOmega and Syquest. 
 
So was the development of front-ends for the PGP/remailer combinations like
Private Idaho and John-Doe. 
 
So does the development of new data transmission technologies, marked by
the simultaneous increase of bandwidth and decrease in costs. 
 
These developments create the technological basis for the mass
proliferation of remailers. 
 
At present we rely on elite remailers, marked by skilled sysops and a
global knowledge of the location of the system. 
 
I would like to see a system of mass remailers, many-to-most of which will
initially not be up for very long. For many people this will not be a
significant problem as the remailers proliferate faster than others go
down. 
 
In other words, I think we will see a time when Captain Boneblood (aka
Billie Smith, age 13) uses the remailer provided by Baron SkuelDrool (aka
Tom Jones, age 14) running off SkuelDrool Sr's computer in the SkruelDrool
family rec-room of Suburbia USA. 
 
The SkuelDrool remailer might never be up for more than a month and will
never be widely known outside the narrow circle of the in-crowd at Warren
G. Harding Jr. High. But before the SKuelDrool remailer goes down, another
two remailers go up at Dan Quail Jr. Collitch and Aaron Burr Sr. High. 
 
The mass remailer network will never replace the elite remailers that will
always have technological advantages over the mass network. 
 
But the combination of elite and mass remailers will make government
crackdowns -- whether local, nationa, or international -- much harder. 
-- 
tallpaul 
 
"To understand the probable outcome of the Libertarian vision, see any
cyberpunk B movie wherein thousands of diseased, desparate and starving
families sit around on ratty old couches on the streets watching television
while rich megalomaniacs appropriate their body parts for their personal
physical immortality." 
     R. U. Sirius 
     _The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook_