Cryptoanarchy in the field

[nobody@cypherpunks.ca (John Anonymous MacDonald)]

At 5:44 AM 11/13/1996, Adam Back wrote:
>>What we need is an experiment.  Let's pick a country with a near
>>police state and design a system so that people in that country
>>can freely and securely communicate with each other and the outside
>>world with minimal chance of arrest.  Once the system is available,
>>we can see if it succeeds in the field.  I'll leave others to
>>suggest the target.
>
>I would suggest starting with remailers, rather than interactive
>traffic such as web traffic would be the easier target.  Might even
>present a positive spin in the press for anonymity and remailers for a
>change.

Positive publicity?  How about Iraq?  What kind of computer equipment does
the Army have?  What happens when the Iraqi Army suddenly becomes able
to conspire?

What if they were provided only with authentication of anonymous
identities.  How much could they do with "underground newspapers"
that traveled on sneaker net?

>So what good stego techniques are there for text.  Do singaporeans use
>a non ascii character set?  (As the Chinese use things like Big5
>encoding). Anyone know of any features of the character set that
>Singaporeans use which could be used for a subliminal channel?

How many people in Singapore speak English?

>Sure, if you keep cypherpunks list going even after crypto discussions
>have been outlawed, you can keep discussions, and then the ammount of
>ecash usage, and bandwidth may be more condusive to working out
>anonymous payment systems.

Pornography is a powerful motivator that need not involve money.
The CIA used to trade porn for secrets during the Cold War.  It seems
low ranking Russian officers used it to reward obedient young soldiers
who were not allowed to leave custody during their first two years
of service.