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10th aniversary posting
FROM CROSSBOWS TO CRYPTOGRAPHY: TECHNO-THWARTING THE STATE
by Chuck Hammill
[email protected]
Given at the Future of Freedom Conference, November 1987
Public Domain: Duplicate and Distribute Freely
You know, technology--and particularly computer
technology--has often gotten a bad rap in Libertarian cir-
cles. We tend to think of Orwell's 1984, or Terry Gilliam's
Brazil, or the proximity detectors keeping East Berlin's
slave/citizens on their own side of the border, or the so-
phisticated bugging devices Nixon used to harass those on
his "enemies list." Or, we recognize that for the price of
a ticket on the Concorde we can fly at twice the speed of
sound, but only if we first walk thru a magnetometer run by
a government policeman, and permit him to paw thru our be-
longings if it beeps.
But I think that mind-set is a mistake. Before there
were cattle prods, governments tortured their prisoners with
clubs and rubber hoses. Before there were lasers for
eavesdropping, governments used binoculars and lip-readers.
Though government certainly uses technology to oppress, the
evil lies not in the tools but in the wielder of the tools.
In fact, technology represents one of the most promis-
ing avenues available for re-capturing our freedoms from
those who have stolen them. By its very nature, it favors
the bright (who can put it to use) over the dull (who can-
not). It favors the adaptable (who are quick to see the
merit of the new( over the sluggish (who cling to time-
tested ways). And what two better words are there to de-
scribe government bureaucracy than "dull" and "sluggish"?
One of the clearest, classic triumphs of technology
over tyranny I see is the invention of the man-portable
crossbow. With it, an untrained peasant could now reliably
and lethally engage a target out to fifty meters--even if
that target were a mounted, chain-mailed knight. (Unlike
the longbow, which, admittedly was more powerful, and could
get off more shots per unit time, the crossbow required no
formal training to utilize. Whereas the longbow required
elaborate visual, tactile and kinesthetic coordination to
achieve any degree of accuracy, the wielder of a crossbow
could simply put the weapon to his shoulder, sight along the
arrow itself, and be reasonably assured of hitting his tar-
get.)
Moreover, since just about the only mounted knights
likely to visit your average peasant would be government
soldiers and tax collectors, the utility of the device was
plain: With it, the common rabble could defend themselves
not only against one another, but against their governmental
masters. It was the medieval equivalent of the armor-
piercing bullet, and, consequently, kings and priests (the
medieval equivalent of a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Crossbows) threatened death and excommunication, respec-
tively, for its unlawful possession.
Looking at later developments, we see how technology
like the firearm--particularly the repeating rifle and the
handgun, later followed by the Gatling gun and more advanced
machine guns--radically altered the balance of interpersonal
and inter-group power. Not without reason was the Colt .45
called "the equalizer." A frail dance-hall hostess with one
in her possession was now fully able to protect herself
against the brawniest roughneck in any saloon. Advertise-
ments for the period also reflect the merchandising of the
repeating cartridge rifle by declaring that "a man on
horseback, armed with one of these rifles, simply cannot be
captured." And, as long as his captors were relying upon
flintlocks or single-shot rifles, the quote is doubtless a
true one.
Updating now to the present, the public-key cipher
(with a personal computer to run it) represents an equiv-
alent quantum leap--in a defensive weapon. Not only can
such a technique be used to protect sensitive data in one's
own possession, but it can also permit two strangers to ex-
change information over an insecure communications
channel--a wiretapped phone line, for example, or
skywriting, for that matter)--without ever having previously
met to exchange cipher keys. With a thousand-dollar com-
puter, you can create a cipher that a multi-megabuck CRAY
X-MP can't crack in a year. Within a few years, it should
be economically feasible to similarly encrypt voice communi-
cations; soon after that, full-color digitized video images.
Technology will not only have made wiretapping obsolete, it
will have totally demolished government's control over in-
formation transfer.
I'd like to take just a moment to sketch the mathemat-
ics which makes this principle possible. This algorithm is
called the RSA algorithm, after Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman
who jointly created it. Its security derives from the fact
that, if a very large number is the product of two very
large primes, then it is extremely difficult to obtain the
two prime factors from analysis of their product. "Ex-
tremely" in the sense that if primes p and q have 100
digits apiece, then their 200-digit product cannot in gen-
eral be factored in less than 100 years by the most powerful
computer now in existence.
The "public" part of the key consists of (1) the prod-
uct pq of the two large primes p and q, and (2) one fac-
tor, call it x , of the product xy where xy = {(p-1) *
(q-1) + 1}. The "private" part of the key consists of the
other factor y.
Each block of the text to be encrypted is first turned
into an integer--either by using ASCII, or even a simple
A=01, B=02, C=03, ... , Z=26 representation. This integer
is then raised to the power x (modulo pq) and the resulting
integer is then sent as the encrypted message. The receiver
decrypts by taking this integer to the (secret) power y
(modulo pq). It can be shown that this process will always
yield the original number started with.
What makes this a groundbreaking development, and why
it is called "public-key" cryptography," is that I can
openly publish the product pq and the number x , while
keeping secret the number y --so that anyone can send me
an encrypted message, namely
x
a (mod pq) ,
but only I can recover the original message a , by taking
what they send, raising it to the power y and taking the
result (mod pq). The risky step (meeting to exchange cipher
keys) has been eliminated. So people who may not even trust
each other enough to want to meet, may still reliably ex-
change encrypted messages--each party having selected and
disseminated his own pq and his x , while maintaining
the secrecy of his own y .
Another benefit of this scheme is the notion of a "dig-
ital signature," to enable one to authenticate the source of
a given message. Normally, if I want to send you a message,
I raise my plaintext a to your x and take the result (mod
your pq) and send that.
However, if in my message, I take the plaintext a and
raise it to my (secret) power y , take the result (mod my
pq), then raise that result to your x (mod your pq) and
send this, then even after you have normally "decrypted" the
message, it will still look like garbage. However, if you
then raise it to my public power x , and take the result
(mod my public pq ), so you will not only recover the ori-
ginal plaintext message, but you will know that no one but I
could have sent it to you (since no one else knows my secret
y ).
And these are the very concerns by the way that are to-
day tormenting the Soviet Union about the whole question of
personal computers. On the one hand, they recognize that
American schoolchildren are right now growing up with com-
puters as commonplace as sliderules used to be--more so, in
fact, because there are things computers can do which will
interest (and instruct) 3- and 4-year-olds. And it is pre-
cisely these students who one generation hence will be going
head-to-head against their Soviet counterparts. For the
Soviets to hold back might be a suicidal as continuing to
teach swordsmanship while your adversaries are learning
ballistics. On the other hand, whatever else a personal
computer may be, it is also an exquisitely efficient copying
machine--a floppy disk will hold upwards of 50,000 words of
text, and can be copied in a couple of minutes. If this
weren't threatening enough, the computer that performs the
copy can also encrypt the data in a fashion that is all but
unbreakable. Remember that in Soviet society publicly ac-
cessible Xerox machines are unknown. (The relatively few
copying machines in existence are controlled more inten-
sively than machine guns are in the United States.)
Now the "conservative" position is that we should not
sell these computers to the Soviets, because they could use
them in weapons systems. The "liberal" position is that we
should sell them, in the interests of mutual trade and
cooperation--and anyway, if we don't make the sale, there
will certainly be some other nation willing to.
For my part, I'm ready to suggest that the Libertarian
position should be to give them to the Soviets for free, and
if necessary, make them take them . . . and if that doesn't
work load up an SR-71 Blackbird and air drop them over
Moscow in the middle of the night. Paid for by private sub-
scription, of course, not taxation . . . I confess that this
is not a position that has gained much support among members
of the conventional left-right political spectrum, but, af-
ter all, in the words of one of Illuminatus's characters, we
are political non-Euclideans: The shortest distance to a
particular goal may not look anything like what most people
would consider a "straight line." Taking a long enough
world-view, it is arguable that breaking the Soviet govern-
ment monopoly on information transfer could better lead to
the enfeeblement and, indeed, to the ultimate dissolution of
the Soviet empire than would the production of another dozen
missiles aimed at Moscow.
But there's the rub: A "long enough" world view does
suggest that the evil, the oppressive, the coercive and the
simply stupid will "get what they deserve," but what's not
immediately clear is how the rest of us can escape being
killed, enslaved, or pauperized in the process.
When the liberals and other collectivists began to at-
tack freedom, they possessed a reasonably stable, healthy,
functioning economy, and almost unlimited time to proceed to
hamstring and dismantle it. A policy of political
gradualism was at least conceivable. But now, we have
patchwork crazy-quilt economy held together by baling wire
and spit. The state not only taxes us to "feed the poor"
while also inducing farmers to slaughter milk cows and drive
up food prices--it then simultaneously turns around and sub-
sidizes research into agricultural chemicals designed to in-
crease yields of milk from the cows left alive. Or witness
the fact that a decline in the price of oil is considered as
potentially frightening as a comparable increase a few years
ago. When the price went up, we were told, the economy
risked collapse for for want of energy. The price increase
was called the "moral equivalent of war" and the Feds swung
into action. For the first time in American history, the
speed at which you drive your car to work in the morning be-
came an issue of Federal concern. Now, when the price of
oil drops, again we risk problems, this time because Ameri-
can oil companies and Third World basket-case nations who
sell oil may not be able to ever pay their debts to our
grossly over-extended banks. The suggested panacea is that
government should now re-raise the oil prices that OPEC has
lowered, via a new oil tax. Since the government is seeking
to raise oil prices to about the same extent as OPEC did,
what can we call this except the "moral equivalent of civil
war--the government against its own people?"
And, classically, in international trade, can you imag-
ine any entity in the world except a government going to
court claiming that a vendor was selling it goods too
cheaply and demanding not only that that naughty vendor be
compelled by the court to raise its prices, but also that it
be punished for the act of lowering them in the first place?
So while the statists could afford to take a couple of
hundred years to trash our economy and our liberties--we
certainly cannot count on having an equivalent period of
stability in which to reclaim them. I contend that there
exists almost a "black hole" effect in the evolution of
nation-states just as in the evolution of stars. Once free-
dom contracts beyond a certain minimum extent, the state
warps the fabric of the political continuum about itself to
the degree that subsequent re-emergence of freedom becomes
all but impossible. A good illustration of this can be seen
in the area of so-called "welfare" payments. When those who
sup at the public trough outnumber (and thus outvote) those
whose taxes must replenish the trough, then what possible
choice has a democracy but to perpetuate and expand the tak-
ing from the few for the unearned benefit of the many? Go
down to the nearest "welfare" office, find just two people
on the dole . . . and recognize that between them they form
a voting bloc that can forever outvote you on the question
of who owns your life--and the fruits of your life's labor.
So essentially those who love liberty need an "edge" of
some sort if we're ultimately going to prevail. We obvi-
ously can't use the altruists' "other-directedness" of
"work, slave, suffer, sacrifice, so that next generation of
a billion random strangers can live in a better world."
Recognize that, however immoral such an appeal might be, it
is nonetheless an extremely powerful one in today's culture.
If you can convince people to work energetically for a
"cause," caring only enough for their personal welfare so as
to remain alive enough and healthy enough to continue
working--then you have a truly massive reservoir of energy
to draw from. Equally clearly, this is just the sort of ap-
peal which tautologically cannot be utilized for egoistic or
libertarian goals. If I were to stand up before you tonight
and say something like, "Listen, follow me as I enunciate my
noble "cause," contribute your money to support the "cause,"
give up your free time to work for the "cause," strive
selflessly to bring it about, and then (after you and your
children are dead) maybe your children's children will actu-
ally live under egoism"--you'd all think I'd gone mad. And
of course you'd be right. Because the point I'm trying to
make is that libertarianism and/or egoism will be spread if,
when, and as, individual libertarians and/or egoists find it
profitable and/or enjoyable to do so. And probably only
then.
While I certainly do not disparage the concept of poli-
tical action, I don't believe that it is the only, nor even
necessarily the most cost-effective path toward increasing
freedom in our time. Consider that, for a fraction of the
investment in time, money and effort I might expend in try-
ing to convince the state to abolish wiretapping and all
forms of censorship--I can teach every libertarian who's in-
terested how to use cryptography to abolish them
unilaterally.
There is a maxim--a proverb--generally attributed to
the Eskimoes, which very likely most Libertarians have al-
ready heard. And while you likely would not quarrel with
the saying, you might well feel that you've heard it often
enough already, and that it has nothing further to teach us,
and moreover, that maybe you're even tired of hearing it. I
shall therefore repeat it now:
If you give a man a fish, the saying runs, you feed him
for a day. But if you teach a man how to fish, you feed him
for a lifetime.
Your exposure to the quote was probably in some sort of
a "workfare" vs. "welfare" context; namely, that if you
genuinely wish to help someone in need, you should teach him
how to earn his sustenance, not simply how to beg for it.
And of course this is true, if only because the next time he
is hungry, there might not be anybody around willing or even
able to give him a fish, whereas with the information on how
to fish, he is completely self sufficient.
But I submit that this exhausts only the first order
content of the quote, and if there were nothing further to
glean from it, I would have wasted your time by citing it
again. After all, it seems to have almost a crypto-altruist
slant, as though to imply that we should structure our ac-
tivities so as to maximize the benefits to such hungry
beggars as we may encounter.
But consider:
Suppose this Eskimo doesn't know how to fish, but he
does know how to hunt walruses. You, on the other hand,
have often gone hungry while traveling thru walrus country
because you had no idea how to catch the damn things, and
they ate most of the fish you could catch. And now suppose
the two of you decide to exchange information, bartering
fishing knowledge for hunting knowledge. Well, the first
thing to observe is that a transaction of this type
categorically and unambiguously refutes the Marxist premise
that every trade must have a "winner" and a "loser;" the
idea that if one person gains, it must necessarily be at the
"expense" of another person who loses. Clearly, under this
scenario, such is not the case. Each party has gained some-
thing he did not have before, and neither has been dimin-
ished in any way. When it comes to exchange of information
(rather than material objects) life is no longer a zero-sum
game. This is an extremely powerful notion. The "law of
diminishing returns," the "first and second laws of
thermodynamics"--all those "laws" which constrain our possi-
bilities in other contexts--no longer bind us! Now that's
anarchy!
Or consider another possibility: Suppose this hungry
Eskimo never learned to fish because the ruler of his
nation-state had decreed fishing illegal. Because fish
contain dangerous tiny bones, and sometimes sharp spines, he
tells us, the state has decreed that their consumption--and
even their possession--are too hazardous to the people's
health to be permitted . . . even by knowledgeable, willing
adults. Perhaps it is because citizens' bodies are thought
to be government property, and therefore it is the function
of the state to punish those who improperly care for govern-
ment property. Or perhaps it is because the state gener-
ously extends to competent adults the "benefits" it provides
to children and to the mentally ill: namely, a full-time,
all-pervasive supervisory conservatorship--so that they need
not trouble themselves with making choices about behavior
thought physically risky or morally "naughty." But, in any
case, you stare stupefied, while your Eskimo informant re-
lates how this law is taken so seriously that a friend of
his was recently imprisoned for years for the crime of "pos-
session of nine ounces of trout with intent to distribute."
Now you may conclude that a society so grotesquely
oppressive as to enforce a law of this type is simply an
affront to the dignity of all human beings. You may go far-
ther and decide to commit some portion of your discretion-
ary, recreational time specifically to the task of thwarting
this tyrant's goal. (Your rationale may be "altruistic" in
the sense of wanting to liberate the oppressed, or
"egoistic" in the sense of proving you can outsmart the
oppressor--or very likely some combination of these or per-
haps even other motives.)
But, since you have zero desire to become a martyr to
your "cause," you're not about to mount a military campaign,
or even try to run a boatload of fish through the blockade.
However, it is here that technology--and in particular in-
formation technology--can multiply your efficacy literally a
hundredfold. I say "literally," because for a fraction of
the effort (and virtually none of the risk) attendant to
smuggling in a hundred fish, you can quite readily produce a
hundred Xerox copies of fishing instructions. (If the tar-
geted government, like present-day America, at least permits
open discussion of topics whose implementation is re-
stricted, then that should suffice. But, if the government
attempts to suppress the flow of information as well, then
you will have to take a little more effort and perhaps write
your fishing manual on a floppy disk encrypted according to
your mythical Eskimo's public-key parameters. But as far as
increasing real-world access to fish you have made genuine
nonzero headway--which may continue to snowball as others
re-disseminate the information you have provided. And you
have not had to waste any of your time trying to convert id-
eological adversaries, or even trying to win over the unde-
cided. Recall Harry Browne's dictum from "Freedom in an
Unfree World" that the success of any endeavor is in general
inversely proportional to the number of people whose persua-
sion is necessary to its fulfilment.
If you look at history, you cannot deny that it has
been dramatically shaped by men with names like Washington,
Lincoln, . . . Nixon . . . Marcos . . . Duvalier . . .
Khadaffi . . . and their ilk. But it has also been shaped
by people with names like Edison, Curie, Marconi, Tesla and
Wozniak. And this latter shaping has been at least as per-
vasive, and not nearly so bloody.
And that's where I'm trying to take The LiberTech
Project. Rather than beseeching the state to please not en-
slave, plunder or constrain us, I propose a libertarian net-
work spreading the technologies by which we may seize
freedom for ourselves.
But here we must be a bit careful. While it is not (at
present) illegal to encrypt information when government
wants to spy on you, there is no guarantee of what the fu-
ture may hold. There have been bills introduced, for exam-
ple, which would have made it a crime to wear body armor
when government wants to shoot you. That is, if you were to
commit certain crimes while wearing a Kevlar vest, then that
fact would constitute a separate federal crime of its own.
This law to my knowledge has not passed . . . yet . . . but
it does indicate how government thinks.
Other technological applications, however, do indeed
pose legal risks. We recognize, for example, that anyone
who helped a pre-Civil War slave escape on the "underground
railroad" was making a clearly illegal use of technology--as
the sovereign government of the United States of America at
that time found the buying and selling of human beings quite
as acceptable as the buying and selling of cattle. Simi-
larly, during Prohibition, anyone who used his bathtub to
ferment yeast and sugar into the illegal psychoactive drug,
alcohol--the controlled substance, wine--was using technol-
ogy in a way that could get him shot dead by federal agents
for his "crime"--unfortunately not to be restored to life
when Congress reversed itself and re-permitted use of this
drug.
So . . . to quote a former President, un-indicted co-
conspirator and pardoned felon . . . "Let me make one thing
perfectly clear:" The LiberTech Project does not advocate,
participate in, or conspire in the violation of any law--no
matter how oppressive, unconstitutional or simply stupid
such law may be. It does engage in description (for educa-
tional and informational purposes only) of technological
processes, and some of these processes (like flying a plane
or manufacturing a firearm) may well require appropriate li-
censing to perform legally. Fortunately, no license is
needed for the distribution or receipt of information it-
self.
So, the next time you look at the political scene and
despair, thinking, "Well, if 51% of the nation and 51% of
this State, and 51% of this city have to turn Libertarian
before I'll be free, then somebody might as well cut my
goddamn throat now, and put me out of my misery"--recognize
that such is not the case. There exist ways to make your-
self free.
If you wish to explore such techniques via the Project,
you are welcome to give me your name and address--or a fake
name and mail drop, for that matter--and you'll go on the
mailing list for my erratically-published newsletter. Any
friends or acquaintances whom you think would be interested
are welcome as well. I'm not even asking for stamped self-
addressed envelopes, since my printer can handle mailing la-
bels and actual postage costs are down in the noise compared
with the other efforts in getting an issue out. If you
should have an idea to share, or even a useful product to
plug, I'll be glad to have you write it up for publication.
Even if you want to be the proverbial "free rider" and just
benefit from what others contribute--you're still welcome:
Everything will be public domain; feel free to copy it or
give it away (or sell it, for that matter, 'cause if you can
get money for it while I'm taking full-page ads trying to
give it away, you're certainly entitled to your capitalist
profit . . .) Anyway, every application of these principles
should make the world just a little freer, and I'm certainly
willing to underwrite that, at least for the forseeable fu-
ture.
I will leave you with one final thought: If you don't
learn how to beat your plowshares into swords before they
outlaw swords, then you sure as HELL ought to learn before
they outlaw plowshares too.
--Chuck Hammill
THE LIBERTECH PROJECT