e$: In Vino Veritas

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

I love this prohibition stuff.

First recreational drugs, then guns, then cryptography, then tobbacco, and
now, the grandaddy of all prohibitions, alcohol sales, on the net in
Florida, with good old vino being retreaded as a brand new thin edge of the
tired old wedge of government behavioral control.

Once again, a whole generation of libertines now becomes moralistic in
their old age. Same as it ever was. Remember that the Romantics (Beethoven,
Chopin, the waltzing Strausses, etc.) grew up to become the Victorians (the
temperance, missionary, conservation, and "indian school" movements).


So, maybe it *is* time to move to a country where the average age is under
30. Fortunately, there are a lot of them, thanks to exploding life
expectancy caused by advancing technological progress   and Peale's
"demographic transition". Maybe soon they'll have enough wealth (and
technological creativity) of their own to ignore the increasing
constrictions of what Tim May likes to call the "Terror State". I'd gladly
exchange a moribund environment of backward-looking luddism for a cheerful
attack on the problem of making the future happen, anytime. Unfortunately,
that doesn't look like an option, not just yet, anyway.


The other thing which comes to mind with all this is, of course, financial
cryptography, which, contrary to the opinion of more than a few on the
e-mail lists I'm on, I see as the thin edge of another kind of wedge. It is
financial cryptography which will kill cryptographic prohibition, and,
someday, prohibition of other technologies as well.


Currently, the relaxation of export controls on cryptography is now merely
a cudgel to make us submit to ubiquitous wiretapping, and not for national
security, the original purpose of such controls.

Former National Security Agency Chief Counsel Stewart Baker said at the
Digital Commerce Society of Boston luncheon this Tuesday that the
management of the NSA gave up on succeeding with cryptographic export
controls in 1993, and that their only hope was to enlist Federal Bureau of
Investigation Director Louis Freeh in their efforts by showing him threat
of cryptography to his wiretap apparatus. It's now quite clear that the NSA
is fighting a retreat on strong cryptography, and that they're using Louis
Freeh and the FBI to do it for them.  So, at this point, any residual
attempts by the national security apparatus per se to control exports,
beyond assisting Freeh in slowing down technological progress, is just
regulatory inertia. Still real and very dangerous to anyone who believes in
freedom and privacy, but lacking any further accelleration to move it
forward, once the momentum it already has finally goes away.

In my conversation last year with senior people there, the Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network (FinCEN), responsible for catching money launderers and
other financial criminals and another would-be cryptographic hoplaphobe,
certainly seemed to understand that if blind-signature digital bearer
certificates are proven to be as economically efficient as a few of us on
the net think they will be, FinCEN's ability to monitor transactions on the
net will just disappear. Not only because they can't see those transaction
behind the Chaumian blind-signature algorithm, but because the sheer volume
of transactions (the micromoney mitochondria,
digital-cash-as-microprocessor-food idea I like to throw around, as an
extreme example) will physically choke any monitoring effort they attempt
to build. In yet another paraphrase of John Gilmore's law of internet
censorship, the net sees surveillance as damage, and routes around it.
Again, inertia is a problem here, and the powers-that-be at FinCEN haven't
given up quite yet on ultimately controlling the impending explosion of
internet financial cryptography, as NSA's management seems to have with
crypto in general. Mostly because all the starry-eyed claims people like me
make on behalf of digital bearer certificates are just that, claims, with
no empirical evidence so far to back them up. Yet. :-).

Finally, that leaves wiretaps, and the FBI's Louis Freeh, a man who got his
law-enforcement bones because of bugs and wiretaps, and who has never seen
a wiretap he didn't like. First of all, Freeh faces the same problem FinCEN
faces. Even if it were economically possible for the FBI to get the
monsterous wiretap capability that the freshly legislated CALEA now crams
down the collective financial throat of every telecoms manufacturer and
provider on earth. Even if he did get access to all cryptographic keys,
which he can't physically do, because economics will require that most of
those session keys be disposed of as fast as they're used. Even if, in
spite of both of those flights of economic fantasy, he were able to do so,
Freeh still can't physically monitor all that communication, in the same
sense that FinCEN can't follow all those transactions on the internet.
Gilmore's Law strikes again.

But, the joke here, of course, is that surveillence technology in meatspace
itself is going to continue to increase. The eventual prospect of
ubiquitous videobugging both by government and private sources means that a
lot of David Brin's surveillance society will probably come to pass, and
physical crime will continue to diminish as a result.  The law-enforcement
need for tapped or "excrowed" communictions will probably disappear,
because even when Freeh & Co. couldn't just subpoena some stored private
video somewhere, planting a physical bug, Gotti-style, will be much easier
than listening in to an "excrowed" communication with disposable session
keys.

Much in the same way, I might add, as if the NSA bunch had never mentioned
the idea of key escrow at all to Louis Freeh. That's because the inherent
need of corporations to secure their own data from the hostile or
accidental behavior of their own people would have already created a market
for encrypted data recovery anyway. All the law enforcement community would
need to do to get access to that information is the same thing they use for
anything else: a subpoena. Again, the "rational control" of government
destroyed what would have been a much more efficient market driven
technology. Like the filtering of offensive internet content was before the
Communications Decency Act threatened to "require" it, some very creative
people were thinking very hard about private key and cryptography data
recovery schemes and now won't touch them because the government wants to
mandate key escrow, er, "recovery", into existance.

However, the last laugh in the upcoming surveillance society will
eventually be had by privacy advocates on would-be totalitarians like Mr.
Freeh, and, it seems, on Al Gore, who seems to be Freeh's chief cheerleader
in the Clinton administration. Remember that Stalin, too, came to
totalitarianism from the absolutism of the extreme left, and leftist
absolutism is something Mr. Gore's book "Earth in the Balance" is chock
full of. Somewhere, Freddy Hayek is laughing.

Anyway, in the ultimate twist of fate, all those ubiquitous surveillance
devices will be predominantly in *private* hands, and, as the cleptocracy
of the modern nation state continues to implode from it's own greed and
power-lust, those surveillance devices will, eventually, be linked to
privately held security firms, and, maybe someday to autonomous
*munitions*. See the "Mesh and the Net",
<http://www.shipwright.com/meshnet.html>, for some hints to this kind of
defensive military technology. I claim that as we will be able to allocate
network resources with some kind of cash settled economy, so too will we
someday be be able to directly "purchase" the services of these kinds of
technologies, without the centralized economic distortion of a
nation-state. In other words, we'll be much more physically secure without
people like Mr. Freeh, than with them.

While that's a long way off, it's probably not so far as freedom and
privacy advocates fear. For instance, if, say, 10 years from now, as some
people have predicted, your home security system had complete visual
coverage of your property with a swarm of very cheap CCD videocameras, all
streaming that encrypted video over the net to some secure (possibly
anonymous) storage place, then not only do criminals have a tougher time
comitting crimes against your person and property, but so too does
government. In addition, with such a system, there's nothing to keep a
private cop or detective from appearing at the scene of the crime, probably
at much less cost than that of a government one. Heck, the purchase of the
cop's or detective's time could occur on a cash-settled auction market, for
that matter.  Paid by private crime insurance, of course. :-). Once again,
information technology reduces government to the functional equivalent of
ceremony, following monarchy down the road to mere decoration and, lately,
occassional entertainment.


Now, I agree that just waiting around for all this to mysteriously appear
won't make it happen any faster. The faster the technology is built,
deployed, and most important, made profitable, the better. And, these days,
all this statist encroachment on our freedom feels, very debatably, like
being a Jew on Krystallnacht waiting for the Americans to win the war
already. But, this technology *is* going to happen, and, while
nation-states aren't going to go down without fighting for their
institutional lives, they *have* lost. Hopefully, the sooner they know
they've lost, the sooner they'll give up, join the human race, and get on
with building the future.


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/