Cypherpunks State of Emergency

["Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>]

I think it's apparent that the events of Friday, with the other shoe to
drop on Monday (the H-P/Intel/Microsoft/etc. Final Capitulation), signal to
us that we are in a State of Emergency.

The Presidents of this country are in the habit of declaring such States of
Emergency, often essentially secretly (in that the sheeple know little of
such things, and those who speak of NSDDs and PDDs and EOs are demonized by
the media as "conspiracy nuts" and "militia members").

Maybe it's time for us to stop flaming about Vulis and his allies, and
concentrate on the Real War.


At 8:17 PM -0500 11/16/96, John Young wrote:
...
>Not to diminish the validity of Tim's alarm, is there not reason to
>anticipate that
>these tokens will be crackable. And thus continue the race between crypto
>enforcers and crackers?

Well, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying "Give up."

In fact, the transparent nature of the government's "voluntary key escrow
for domestic users" strategy should cause redoublings and retriplings of
our efforts.

As John's SWAN program emphasizes, there still are no _import restrictions_
on crypto (and there may be severe constitutional impediments, as we've
debated several times). Get enough alternate channels using non-GAK crypto,
and even the latest Clipper won't succeed.

And sabotaging the GAK scheme in more devious ways remains an option. (I
hear some nym on BlackNet is still bidding $125,000 payable to any offshore
account for certain details related sabotaging GAK.)


"The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM
that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology."
[NYT, 1996-10-02]
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."