From: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 07:40:45 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: May's Banal Rant
In-Reply-To: <6333@lawprof.demon.co.uk>
Message-ID: <19970603161233.30762@bywater.songbird.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



On Mon, Jun 02, 1997 at 11:04:50AM -0700, Lucky Green wrote:
>At 12:14 PM 6/2/97 BST, Michael Froomkin wrote:
> >Rotenburg should be a near-hero to most readers of this list.  Instead,
> >canabalism.   Weird.  Very weird.
>  Michael,
>  You need to realize that Cypherpunks transitionally has been about the

You must mean "traditionally", right?

>*elimination* of all governments. Cypherpunks' goal is called
>crypto-anarchy for a reason. In fact, for Cypherpunks cryptography is
>simply an exceptionally effective tool to achieve anarchy. The
>governments share the belief that wide spread use of crypto will possibly
>lead to anarchy, which is why they attempt to limit its use. The rest is
>smoke and mirrors and statements by people that fail to understand that
>the whole crypto issue is about anarchy and not about math.

I don't know about governments in general, but I don't think the US
government is seriously concerned that cryptography will lead to
"anarchy".  Their concerns about cryptography are much narrower, about
how cryptography can aid criminals, help people avoid taxes, etc. 
These government concerns don't sum to anything even close to anarchy,
either in the traditional literary sense or the obscure technical
sense preferred on this list.

>  Anarchy can not be achieved by negotiations or cooperation with any
>branch of government. Neither can crypto-anarchy be achieved by nuking
>DC.
>  I certainly can understand the reasons that
>would lead a person to start
> thinking that "something is better than nothing" or "the bastards need to
>receive the punishment they so richly deserve". Neither view will help to
>further crypto-anarchy in any meaningful way.

Crypto-anarchy is like communism -- great in theory, impossible in
practice.

>  Have fun,

You too :-)

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html