From: Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 10:36:42 +0800
To: cp@proust.suba.com (Alex Strasheim)
Subject: Re: No matter where you go, there they are.
In-Reply-To: <199604121744.MAA08365@proust.suba.com>
Message-ID: <199604140025.TAA13102@homeport.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


Alex Strasheim wrote:

| > 	Snow Crash is a book about a future in which governments are
| > ineffective.  Companies run things, and have complete local control.
| > The world has gone to hell, and as a result, life is nasty, poor,
| > brutish and short.  Many people do not look forward to this world.
| > Thats an understandable reaction; when I first heard about anonymous
| > assasination markets, I thought it was pretty bizzare as a world to
| > look forward to.
| 
| I agree with you that it's a pretty bizzare world to look forward to, but 
| how likely is it?  It's always seemed to me that both sides of the crypto 
| debate have been overselling the changes crypto is going to bring.  
| Crypto won't make surveillance impossible, it will make it expensive.  
| That's a big difference.

	I no longer feel its a bizzare world, but rather a fascinating
one.  If you're not working for the government.

| My computer is loaded up with crypto.  I use pgp, ssh, sfs, cfs, etc., 
| every day.  I've picked strong passphrases, and I edit sensitive files on 
| a ram disk.  But getting my data would be child's play for the nsa if 
| they were interested enough in me to come into my apartment and make an 
| active attack.

	But you're one person.  The cost of a wiretap is ~ $150,000
per person.  If there are a few hundred cpunks using the remailers, we
lose.  When there are thousands of people using penet, we win.  The
work that needs to be done is good remailer interfaces.  I'm playing
with Premail right now.  PEP is available for the Mac, and I've heard
good things about both Pegasus & Private Idaho on Wintel.

| Military security depends as much upon military discipline and procedure
| as it does on strong crypto tools.  When crypted email becomes the norm,
| remember that 95% of the keys in the world will be sitting on hard drives
| in the clear or protected by passphrases like "bob1".  Software that
| forces people to pick strong passphrases won't be popular in the
| marketplace.  I know:  I run an ISP, and everytime I tell someone how to
| pick a password, they always come back with "bob1".

	But thats ok.  All of this is about economics.  If its as
cheap for me to have a bank account in the Seychelles as it is to have
one in Boston, why have one in Boston?  And if my account isn't in
Boston, the cost of finding out about my finances goes from a few
hundred dollars to a few tens of thousands.

| The truth is the police do surveillence easily and cheaply now, and it's
| not working.  Things are getting worse in many places, not better.  Beat
| cops who talk to people and who know the neighborhood are more effective
| than spooks in vans or centralized monitoring facilities with
| sophisticated electronics.  If we don't want crime, we're going to have 
| to make sure people have enough skills to develop other economic 
| opportunities.  The answer is jobs, not a telescreen in every home.

	The answer is to decriminalize things like drugs and
prositution.  The drop in taxes would create a jobs boom. :)

| I reject the opposition's premise:  surveillance is not necessary to keep
| the four horsemen at bay.  How can they have the chutzpah to demand that I
| sacrifice my civil liberties in the name of the drug war, when everyone in
| Chicago knows that dealers are allowed to sell without harassment on
| literally thousands of street corners in this city?  They don't need
| clipper to stop the crack trade, they need to send cops out to arrest the
| people who are standing out in broad daylight selling and buying.
| 
| It doesn't take a gps system to track them down.

	I agree, but why arrest them?  Why not tax them a little?

Adam


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume