Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997 Pearl Publishing
Stego
Jonathan sipped on his shot of Jim Beam,
scanned the profusion of literature stacked in front of him, and
let out a long overdue sigh of astonishment.
He still found it hard to believe that such a rag-tag band of
off-the-wall individuals, railing against the storm of madness
around them, could have had such a long-reaching impact on the
society and technology around them.
Jonathan had sorted the CypherPunks emails
and CyberPosts into a thousand different categories, arranged
first this way, and then another, and had finally ended up with
just two piles, marked 'sane' and 'insane'.
He laughed, had another sip of bourbon, and lit a cigarette.
These fuckers were crazy, there was no denying
that. In many ways, they were philosopher Kings, arguing, from
a position of comfort and security, over how many CryptoAngels
could stand on the head of a pin.
On any given day they might be found joined together in a mighty
voice, railing against the forces of oppression that were threatening
their freedom, and the freedom of all around them. The next day,
they would be enmeshed in petty squabbles over some minor point
of mathematical theory that the rest of the world neither knew
or cared about.
To all apparent purposes, a quick overview of the postings to
the CypherPunks list would give the impression that the great
debates they engaged in had resulted in little of real import,
other than to perpetuate their own intellectual arrogance.
However, a certain post caught Jonathan's
eye and caused him to begin an investigation that made him view
the CypherPunks eloquently mad ramblings in a new light.
------------
From: [email protected] (Tim May)
Subject: The Balloon is Going Up....criminalization
of noncompliant crypto
<snip>
(An inside joke. It was four and a half years ago, five months before
Clipper, that I wrote an article for sci.crypt entitled "A Trial Balloon to
Ban Crypto?" This outlined Dorothy Denning's "trial balloon" to restrict
cryptography in various ways, including Clipper and key escrow schemes.
There were hundreds of responses to this article, as old archives may show,
and it was one of the first warnings about what has since come to pass.)
<snip>
------------
Jonathan checked the records, and found
that Tim May's claims were, in fact, true. He proceeded to check
the records of that era further, and found that a great deal of
the discussions of the CypherPunks had indeed had a serious impact
on the issues of their day, or foretold the issues of the future.
The CypherPunks had apparently, in their time, stood at the nadir
point of the future, where the issues that were of concern to
them-freedom, privacy, encryption, anarchy-were the issues which
would decide the difference between a future in which mankind
would be free, and a future in which mankind would find themselves
enslaved by impersonal forces with a life of their own-forces
which stood apart from true human concerns.
Once he had divined this important characteristic
of the CypherPunks rambling discussions, Jonathan suddenly became
aware of the significance of the attempted takeover of the CypherPunks
list, and the subsequent attacks on their remailer system. It
threw a whole new light on both affairs.
It had been a mystery to Jonathan why one of the list founders
would have taken part in such a transparent and badly executed
plan to enforce censorship on such a omnivorous pack of sharp-toothed
anarchist. Now, however, it seemed to Jonathan that certain entities
within the CypherPunks had received advanced warning of the coming
remailer attacks and had precipitated the censorship crisis in
order to shake up the list membership and get them pumped up for
the coming battle.
Or, perhaps not.
Like everything else surrounding the CypherPunks, the motivations and personal impetus behind the actors in these scenarios would eternally remain a mystery except to the individuals involved. (And, in some cases, maybe even to the individuals themselves.)
But regardless of the particular motivations
of each individual CypherPunk, there was no denying that the end
result of their cycles of sanity and insanity led to technological
innovations and definitions of socio-political issues that changed
the face of science and society around them.
It was not just the direct results of their developmental efforts
that had a long-ranging impact, but also their propensity for
circumventing systems, methodologies and legislative actions,
which then led to those in authority scrambling madly to close
the technical and legal loopholes that the CypherPunks would pry
open each time that government and corporate interests would attempt
to slam shut the lid on privacy and freedom.
At each stage of CypherPunk achievement, it seemed that the government would usurp control over its development, at which point the hackers and phreaks would compromise the government approved systems, while the CypherPunks were busy taking the technology to yet another level (which the government would again legislate government control over).
When Jonathan had begun to suspect the amount
of impact the CypherPunks had had in their time, he began to cross-reference
their activities with the archives from 'Wired', 'Hot-Wired',
'Hard-Wired' and 'Un-Wired'. In almost every case, the CypherPunks
were leading the techo-political arena of their day, instead of
complacently following along behind.
"Assassination Politics," originated by Jim Bell, had been just a theoretical exercise during his lifetime, dismissed by most who read it as a thinly veiled joke, at best. Bell, however, had developed a workable autobot which instituted his system, albeit in a very rudimentary way.
Basically, his procedure was analogous to a lottery system where the players were contributing to a prize that could be collected, not by chance, but by anyone who fulfilled the preconditions of those contributing. And the precondition was that, in order to pocket the 'prize', one had to assassinate the person targeted by the contributors. Since Bell's system used anonymous remailers, his system would allow individuals and groups to anonymously defend themselves from all types of aggression.
Eventually someone modified Bell's 'Assassination
Bot' to serve as a useful tool for political polling. Someone
else took it a step further, and it became a valid electoral tool.
Then, inevitably, just before the Channel Revolution broke out,
it's newly refined features were once again modified to serve
Bell's original purpose, and all hell broke loose when established
geo-political figures began dropping like flies, or resigning
in terror when they realized that the people were indeed speaking,
and doing so by putting a price on the heads of their oppressors.
William Geiger III's system of revolving web mirrors never made the cut as a viable method of circumventing various governments' blocking of web pages they considered undesirable for their citizens to have access to. Likewise, Adam Back's hash-cash digital collision system, which required users to use CPU time to develop email postage credits, failed in its stated purpose of lessening the amount of spam, or unsolicited email, which had plagued InterNet users at the time he developed the concept.
Later, however, a retired Phil Zimmerman, not content to rest on his laurels as the 'Father of Public Cryptography', had combined the two concepts with a new public key technology, and made it possible for those with access to revolving public keys to access the mirrors, while those without them were faced with needing to expend inordinate amounts of CPU time in order to generate the massive amounts of hash-cash needed in order to follow the chain of mirrors to the 'undesirable' sites.
Governments would, of course, eventually ferret out the sources of the mirror sites, at which time the underground organization 'InterNet Free World' would merely broadcast the new mirror keys and new mirror site-maps to members of the Trusted Others, and the dissemination process would begin all over again, with the government having to start, once more, from Ground Zero.
In almost every thread Jonathan followed,
there would be some minor or major item of discussion or development
which would later prove to be an influential fulcrum-point from
which various technologies or social causes would spring up and
evolve.
The one thing which seemed to be odd to Jonathan, however, was the quickness with which the remailer network disappeared into the woodwork after they came under socio-politico attack from every conceivable direction.
The problem with the remailers was that they served their purpose a little too well. They were an easily accessible way for the average person to remain anonymous while sending email, thus hiding their identity from those they sent their missives to.
In theory, the remailers were a wonderful
tool for the disadvantaged, the oppressed, and other victims of
circumstance to anonymously address issues that could bring serious
repercussions down on them if their identity became known.
In actual practice, however, they became a tool for assholes and
aggressive entrepreneurs to prey upon a multitude of victims without
their targets having a method of recourse. When the InterNet underwent
a massive increase in popularity, the weirdoes, assholes and money-grubbers
became the order of the day, and the capabilities that the anonymous
remailers offered for them to escape consequences for even the
most abominable of actions left the remailers open to extremely
high levels of abuse.
Since the users remained anonymous, the
only target of attack for those who felt victimized by the messages
passing through them were the remailer operators.
The government agencies which wished to replace the CypherPunks
remailers with their own email routing systems launched a campaign
to totally discredit the individual remailers, and soon they were
dropping like flies, both from covert government manipulations
and subsequent legislation leaving them open to legal attack,
once the public outcry began.
What Jonathan found curious was the fact
that the CypherPunks went to great lengths to develop various
systems and methodologies to counter the growing inadequacies
of the remailers once the common masses descended on the InterNet,
and yet, just when they seemed to have theoretically solved most
of the problems before them, the CypherPunks remailers folded
in a surprisingly short period of time.
Jonathan had, by this time, learned that any anomalies surrounding
the CypherPunks was best approached with an in-depth analysis
of all events surrounding the mysterious events, and what he found
when he did a cross-patch analysis of the emails from this time
period surprised him, to say the least.
Tim May, the undisputed bellwether of the
CryptoPhilospher Kings, had been the target of a massive campaign
of ASCII art attacks, subjecting him to all kinds of demeaning
implications as to his character and his morals. These attacks
were all done anonymously, although the common view was that they
were propagated by the evil Dr. Vulis, a man with a solid background
in cryptography, but a mental bent which endeared him to few on
the mailing list.
A short time before the rapid decline of the CypherPunks remailers,
however, there was a weird series of graphic-image attacks on
May, apparently by regular members of the list, including those
who had a history of fully supporting him in many of his statements
of position on the list.
This lasted for a couple of weeks, and then came to an abrupt stop.
Try as he might, Jonathan could not make
heads nor tails of this seemingly out-of-character attack on one
of the patriarchs of the CypherPunks mailing list.
Then, out of the blue, he heard an echo of laughter from a time
long past. A time when he would crouch under the desk in his grandfather's
study, listening to the boisterous laughter of the CypherPunks
as they threw barbed challenges back and forth from one to the
other.
And suddenly, he knew…
Stego.
The remailers had gone underground.
The list members were laughing, not at Tim May, but at the world, as they parodied the ASCII art attacks on him, all the time leaving messages deep in the innards of the graphic artwork that seemed so irksome, on the surface.
Suddenly, Jonathan understood why the CypherPunks, on the verge
of solving all of their remailer problems, had suddenly folded
what seemed to be a winning hand.
They had clearly seen the purge that would come as a result of
the government using the momentum of unfavorable public perception
against the remailers, and had taken themselves out of the line
of fire by seemingly letting the remailers fall by the wayside.
But the CypherPunks had survived and prevailed, right up to the
end of Channel War II, and Jonathan sensed that they did not do
so by caving in so easily to outside pressure from even the highest
of sources.
He did byte-by-byte analysis of the information stored in the
least significant bits of the graphical art submitted to the CypherPunks
list in the weeks before the remailers folded. All he got was
an incoherent jumble of characters which seemed to follow no meaningful
pattern that lent itself to any regular form of analysis.
Jonathan had been exposed to enough CypherPunk humor that he had little trouble in figuring out that the mysterious messages contained in the artwork could likely be decrypted using Tim May's PGP secret key, but he was at a loss as to how to acquire it.
Unless…
Jonathan sat back, sipped on his Jim Beam, and smiled. If his suspicions were right, then he already had the key.
Chapter 24 - Stego