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Re: crypto anarchy vs AP
At 02:06 PM 9/26/96 -0500, snow wrote:
>Mr. Beck said:
>> Been reading the AP thread, and thought I'd donate some of my views.
>
>> the Internet. You'd just cause the government to panic, and this
>> would have negative effects, it would take ages for them to calm down,
>> and the laws they'd pass in the mean time would mean a near certainty
>> of mandatory GAK as a condition to switching the Internet back on.
>> (Before someone takes me to task for the impossibility of switching
>> the Internet off, it all depends on the level of government panic.
>> More specifically perhaps they would disconnect key backbones, and
>> ISPs briefly while they rushed into effect a few presidential decrees
>> outlawing non GAKed crypto, anonymous ecash, remailers, PGP, DC-nets,
>> etc.)
>
> This would be cutting their own throats. There is SO much commercial
>and government traffic going across "The Net" that many businesses would
>scream bloody murder, and the government would have MASSIVE trouble with
>it's agenda.
Yes, that "they'll cut off the Internet!" talk doesn't seem to be very
practical. Society very quickly develops dependency on inventions. Try to
take away their computers and they'd scream; take away their telephone and
it'd be worse! Give Internet another couple of years and 50% of big
business would be severely impacted should it be cut off. Wait five years
and the world would practically stop rotating without Internet.
On a related issue, GPS (global-positioning system) contains a de-accurizing
mis-feature called S/A, which adds a little error to the location as
detected by a receiver. Ostensibly, it was added so that this could be
turned on in wartime, to deny the enemy the ability to make 10-meter fixes.
Turns out that it was kept on all the time, probably because if it WASN'T it
would become politically impossible to de-accurize the system even in wartime.
Jim Bell
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