Coding || Politics || Diplomacy (was: Radical Roots)

[Lou Poppler <lwp@mail.msen.com>]

I saw a part of the PBS VietNam documentary last night, a (North)
Vietnamese general explaining that their defense against the folks with
helicopters was successful because it was never a purely military
strategy, instead always combining the political, the diplomatic and
the military.

What does this have to do with cypherpunks ?   A lot.

The recent unpleasantness in Washington, and Brussels, and London
has inspired many reminders that "Cypherpunks Write Code".
Amen to that -- and we clearly must hurry up and write more code now.
But we can and should do more.

We have long foreseen that the various Horsemen of the Apocalypse would be
used in the sound bite campaign to manufacture support for restrictions on
crypto.  No surprise then that we see this happening.  But there is still
time in this part of the battle, and an encouraging ripple effect of some
of our own political memes.  Many people in the US still remember the
abuses of J. Edgar Hoover, of Richard Nixon, or even Clinton's recent
abuse of FBI files; and these abuses are often mentioned along with the
lowest common denominator explanations of GAK in the mainstream media.
Much of the public in the Western Democracies retains a fuzzy belief in
freedom and privacy, and a fuzzy skepticism of Big Brother.

This is the political part of the battle, and the ranks of cypherpunks
include many people with skills in creating memes and sound bites.  Some
of these may not be coders at all, but they can contribute to the overall
strategy by inserting our own memes into the public's consciousness.  We
may not "win" on the political front alone, but even if the only
accomplishment is to delay the inevitable, this is very good in that it
allows the coders more time to write code.  Such effort is also rewarded
as it allows additional intelligent people to understand the issues and to
join us.  Cypherpunks write memes!

Finally, I will touch briefly on the dirtiest part of the effort -- the
diplomatic.  This has been discussed at length on this list and elsewhere.
The efforts by those who lobby and arm-twist and broker deals in
Washington, Brussels, London, and other nodes of power, may also
contribute to the overall strategy.  Again, we clearly will never "win"
outright in any such endeavors.  But I think it is clear that we again
gain time, breathing room, from such efforts -- time in which we may write
more code and write more memes.  If the lawmakers only hear from the
spooks and the secret police, they will pass their bad laws much sooner.