From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 03:53:56 +0800
To: snow <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk (Adam Back)
Subject: Re: crypto anarchy vs AP
Message-ID: <199609281729.KAA05451@mail.pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 02:06 PM 9/26/96 -0500, snow wrote:
>Mr. Beck said:
>> Been reading the AP thread, and thought I'd donate some of my views.
>
>> the Internet.  You'd just cause the government to panic, and this
>> would have negative effects, it would take ages for them to calm down,
>> and the laws they'd pass in the mean time would mean a near certainty
>> of mandatory GAK as a condition to switching the Internet back on.
>> (Before someone takes me to task for the impossibility of switching
>> the Internet off, it all depends on the level of government panic.
>> More specifically perhaps they would disconnect key backbones, and
>> ISPs briefly while they rushed into effect a few presidential decrees
>> outlawing non GAKed crypto, anonymous ecash, remailers, PGP, DC-nets,
>> etc.)
>
>     This would be cutting their own throats. There is SO much commercial
>and government traffic going across "The Net" that many businesses would 
>scream bloody murder, and the government would have MASSIVE trouble with 
>it's agenda.

Yes, that "they'll cut off the Internet!" talk doesn't seem to be very 
practical.  Society very quickly develops dependency on inventions.  Try to 
take away their computers and they'd scream; take away their telephone and 
it'd be worse!  Give Internet another couple of years and 50% of big 
business would be severely impacted should it be cut off.  Wait five years 
and the world would practically stop rotating without Internet.

On a related issue, GPS (global-positioning system) contains a de-accurizing 
mis-feature called S/A, which adds a little error to the location as 
detected by a receiver.  Ostensibly, it was added so that this could be 
turned on in wartime, to deny the enemy the ability to make 10-meter fixes.  
Turns out that it was kept on all the time, probably because if it WASN'T it 
would become politically impossible to de-accurize the system even in wartime.


Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com