Copyright 1997 Pearl Publishing
The tattered remnants of the Magic Circle sat quietly in front
of the lines drawn in the dirt of the floor of the cave.
Alexis placed a white rock in one of the squares. Jonathan placed
a black rock next to it.
They were engaged in the use of one of the first computers used
to wage InfoWar…an ancient oriental game, called 'Go.'
Fortunes and kingdoms were won and lost over the placement and
arrangement of black and white stones. Like 0 and 1, on and off,
yin and yang.
Cowboy was thinking of an article he had pulled up from the past,
titled, "The History of Chess," or some such, from a
magazine called 'Playboy.'
It described chess as originating in primitive times, with a board
having only one square on it. Each player had one playing piece,
and you could put your piece on the square, as long as you were
willing to back it up with your fists.
He thought about the battle for control of the InterNet that was
taking place a century in the past. The more things change…
During the censorship crisis on the CypherPunks list, when the list members were trying to make sense of what was going down, a lone voice whispering in the wilderness pointed out that the battle being waged had little to do with censorship, and everything to do with InfoWar.
The Tao whispers so that it will be heard by those who do not
have all of their attention tied up in shouting.
The Tao whispered during the censorship crisis, just as it had
whispered in the madness that overtook Germany, then Europe, then
the World. It was heard by the Hermit, and echoed by the Fool.
It whispered "InfoWar."
But it seemed that no one had heard…
The Process of human alchemy marches on: Revelation of the
Method. They are Making Manifest All that is Hidden and what a
hell-fire joke it is--for almost no one is paying conscious attention,
even as the secrets of the time are dropped like pearls before
wine.
-Michael A. Hoffman II
…at least, until history took a step back, and a step to the left.
The whole goal of the hijacking of the phrase "key escrow"
to
camouflage GAK was to obscure the difference between voluntary
and involuntary participation.
Someone getting access to your secrets against your will,
whether by trickery, threat of force, or burglary is not
escrow. At least, not until the USG deliberately chose to
abuse that word to throw a mask of legitimacy upon its rotten
idea of mandatory wiretapping for all digital communication.
Damn, but it is frustrating to see such a bare-faced NewSpeak
gambit succeed so brilliantly against otherwise literate people.
Everyone should read George Orwell's paper on (ab)use
of language in politics. None of the examples he cites are
nearly as worthy of Minitru as is this single conceptual hijacking.
-Zooko Journeyman
At the time that the Trei Transponder exploded, PGP, the holy
icon of the CypherPunks, was under a full-scale frontal attack
by…the CypherPunks.
The reason…Corporate Message Recovery.
Just as the assault by the Dark Forces on PRZ and PGP had alerted the Magic Circle to a soft spot on the underbelly of Gomez and his Dark Allies, the assault on CMR and PGP by the CypherPunks alerted the Dark Forces that they had been premature in celebrating their InfoWar victory in their assault on the CypherPunks list.
About a century too early…
I presume the PGP PR person (who ought to get the sack in my
opinion)
thought that a sudden press release of such marvelous new feature
as
PGP SnoopWare and a SnoopWare Enforcer for Third-parties would
go down
well. It doesn't.
-Adam Back
Although PGP's 'Corporate Message Recovery' software had its proponents
and detractors on the CypherPunks list, the bottom line was that
it marked a change in the battle front in the Crypto Wars.
Even Philip R. Zimmerman, himself, was not happy with the PGP
name being lent to a product which amounted to an expansion of
the definition of privacy to include Little Brother as the 'owner'
of everyone's privacy within a company, and thus, by future extension
of the concept, Big Brother as the 'owner' of everyone's privacy
within a nation (and eventually, within the New World Order).
After a short period of CypherPissing about the few pros and many cons of this new direction in the encryption battle front, the CypherPunk aphorism, "The answer to noise, is more noise." began to take hold, with Tim May broaching the possibilities that "forward secrecy systems" might hold for empowering the individual caught deep within the bowels of the Great Machine.
Wittingly, or unwittingly, the CypherPunk Philosopher King sidestepped
the Ministry of Truth's new definition of privacy by counter-attacking
with a subtle, but important redefinition of email, by using a
seemingly innocent reference to "conventional e-mail"
in his post exploring the possibility of simply 'routing around'
the 'damage' (an old CypherPunk tradition).
Perhaps the answer to 'InfoWar,' is 'more InfoWar.'
Gomez stared at the mountain of references that his Dark Allies
and their human minions had gleaned from email, news groups, mailing
lists and web sites from around the InterNet-references to troubling
new trends and technologies that foreshadowed a threat to the
future that had been preordained by the Evil One.
PHil's Unified Corporate Key-Yardstick of Outbound Uniformity.
No details, but the reference to Zimmermann was obvious. Had
he just begun to explore new developments in the Corporate Key
technology that had been slipped into the mix of his original
concept behind PGP, or did he already have methodologies in place
to defend against the misuse of Corporate Message Recovery?
SAK - Saboteur Access to Keys
This had the Mark of the Toad written all over it.
Throughout the Corporate Message Recovery system, identical corporate
keys began showing up on different systems. All indications were
that people inside the corporations had access to a method of
slipping in the Saboteur Key in a way which its footprint mirrored
that of the original key.
Destination Escrow
This seemed to be the most dangerous of all the quickly emerging
'unconventional email' technologies. It had all the marks of a
collaborative effort between the CypherPunks, the Circle of Eunuch,
Alt2600, MI9, COM-12, and a host of other freeh-dumb fighters.
Remailers, Eternity Servers, Crowds, DevNull Addressing, Inner
Onion Routing-all seemed to play some part in this diverse, but
highly effective methodology of disguising the true routing and
final destinations of email and other communications.
Some of the DE technologies seemed to be escrowed internally,
catching the email after it had been processed by the email system,
and before it had been sent to its destination, either changing
the destination, or mirroring the message to other destinations,
as well.
Some seemed to have the secret code for their true destination
escrowed at some point in the InterNet routing system itself,
outside the watching eyes of internal system security personnel.
Distributed Key Escrow
The Dark Allies were not certain what DKE technology actually
referred to, but it was suspected that many communications contained
plain-text stego which was protected by use of a distributed encryption
and decryption key which could not be compromised except by accessing
the systems of all who held a part of the key.
Unlike the public-private key technology, it seemed to be highly
resistant to attack by gaining control of systems and routers,
or any form of Man-in-the-Middle attacks. It was suspected that
they were combined with the use of a new type of distributed remailer,
as well, but this had been impossible to confirm, as of yet.
Gomez frowned…it looked like InfoWar was going to be a battle, after all.
One thing that the Magic Circle knows from our long battle with Gomez was that he is, above all things, thorough.
There is no doubt in our minds that the Dark Allies, upon searching the rubble of our last safe house, will find the small platinum plaque which will provide not only a verification of the presence of the Circle of Eunuchs and the CypherPunks concealed deeply within the heart of WebWorld, but also a confirmation that:
"The end of our beginnings, will be to arrive from where
we started, and to know it for the first time."
-The Magus
It will not take long for the Dark Allies to notify Gomez, both now and a century in the past, that the front of the plaque reads:
And Gomez will undoubtedly understand, for the first time, the true meaning of the motto of a small computer company formed in Tucson, Arizona, a hundred years previously, when he reads, on the back of the plaque: