cryptoanarchy.wiki

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1994-01-26 - Re:quote of the day

Header Data

From: hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: ef6cbc4f252dad0c4391e588e5dfca25873040e8dd2e5c6f94d6059371be011d
Message ID: <9401261738.AA03059@ah.com>
Reply To: <9401261423.AA07096@anon.penet.fi>
UTC Datetime: 1994-01-26 17:47:10 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 26 Jan 94 09:47:10 PST

Raw message

From: hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 94 09:47:10 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re:quote of the day
In-Reply-To: <9401261423.AA07096@anon.penet.fi>
Message-ID: <9401261738.AA03059@ah.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>That reminds me of my first reaction to CypherPunks: why would the government
>spend thousands of $$$ of supercomputer time & mathematician brains to see
>your miserable piece of information, when all they have to do is lock you up
>at the back of a countryside garage,  beat the shit out of you, inject
>various chemicals into your blood until you spit out your secret key ?

Because of economics and political stability.

You can build computers and monitoring devices in secret, deploy them
in secret, and listen to _everything_.  To listen to everything with
bludgeons and pharmaceuticals would not only cost more in labor and
equipment, but also engender a radicalizing backlash to an actual
police state.

Of course, if one is paranoid, these considerations of the whole do
not hold, since for only one person the cost balance is reversed.

There is safety in numbers.

Eric

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