Re: Symantec's Your Eyes Only

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

At 09:17 AM 7/18/96 -0400, Clay Olbon II wrote:

>My point was not that govts want to escrow communication keys, it was that
>this is appearing more and more in commercial products marketed to
>businesses.  I run the computer system for a small office and I would
>rather not see employee email - maybe I am just naive.  However, there
>obviously is a demand for this type of product.  It must come from either a
>lack of understanding of crypto, or a freeh-style authoritarianism on the
>part of corporate executives.  I wouldn't rule either one out.  If it is
>the latter, I'm not sure there is anything we can do.

A larger organization feels that it has to maintain control over its systems
by bureaucratic methods.  Smaller organizations can figure out by direct
experience whether someone is trustworthy or not.

This is not restricted to encryption software, however.  Large organizations
attempt to determine what their employees should be doing with their time as
well.  This method of social organization works fine when mass producing
large quantities of identical physical products.  It is, however,
incompatible with small-run, custom production of goods and services in
which individual imagination and knowledge play a big part.  In the current
environment, management can't predict in advance what is the optimal thing
that the "workers" should be doing at any given time.

What we call "forcing contracts" (you do this, I pay you) are replaced in
the modern age with "incentive contracts"  (you produce a desired outcome, I
pay you).  This means that as time goes on many businesses approach closer
and closer to the one-man firm model in which everyone buys and sells
everyone else's services on the spot market.  This didn't work in the past
because of the friction of the transaction costs involved but those costs
have declined dramatically.  In this environment, others don't care how much
time you surf the web or what you encrypt as long as your output is of the
desired quality and quantity.

Indeed, the average firm size has been declining in the US for 15 years or
so.  Companies may attempt to resist this dissolution and they may attempt
to maintain traditional controls on their workers but if it is true that the
Nets make it possible for the greater efficiencies of the one-man firm (no
downtime paid by the buyer) to come into play, new small firms will eat the
dinosaurs.

DCF