[2707] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
dbts: Secure Office, Phil Z, cryptographic ubiquity, money, Mad
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Fri May 15 11:08:56 1998
In-Reply-To: <010001bd7f91$cd7e16a0$8e33a2cd@siddhartha.communities.com>
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 09:08:46 -0400
To: <cryptography@c2.net>, Digital Bearer Settlement List <dbs@philodox.com>
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
At 7:41 PM -0400 on 5/14/98, Sidney Markowitz wrote, about the effort to
mirror SecureOffice, now under investigation by the Bureau of Export
Administration for violating the EARs' crypto restrictions:
> All they have to do is proceed
> with the prosecution of the author for his own violation of the law.
Like they tried to do to Phil Z?
:-).
I mean, it was hell for Phil and for Kelly, so forgive me for being
callous, but, in the end, it all worked out. The government gave up. Phil
and Kelly are not in jail. Right now, PGP is as ubiquitous as its
functionality -- and, what's really important, the *market* for crypto, and
not export regulation -- will let it be.
Personally, I think we need to concentrate on the next stage of
cryptographic ubiquity, which is the internet layer and IPSEC, rather than
the application layer, like with PGP, and, it appears, Secure Office.
Nonetheless, the very best thing we can do in this particular situation is
to actually *use* SecureOffice, and not just put it everywhere in protest.
Of course, that's more a function of SecureOffice's utility and the
marketplace than any law. Frankly, it's the *utility* of cryptography, as
measured by the market for it, that will ensure our privacy and ultimately
the repeal of cryptographic control laws, not any righteousness of the
"cause" of privacy itself.
ObHobbyHorse: That's why I like digital bearer transaction settlement so
much. In the process of radically reducing transaction costs (and I say
three orders of magnitude as a benchmark/hurdle for any given,
quantifiable, risk of non-repudiation and security), DBTS has the potential
to completely remove that entire armature of book-entry transaction
execution and settlement that we've built up since the invention of the
telegraph.
If that armature can be made obsolete by something cheaper and more
efficient, then all the stuff hanging off the armature goes away. In other
words, if the book-entries don't need to be there, then neither do the
audit trails required for non-repudiation, and thus all threats to
individual freedom and privacy in modern society built on those audit
trails: not just database marketing information, but, of course, book-entry
taxation and regulation itself, which is virtually all of the regulations,
taxes, and invasions of privacy we are now confronted with.
Would-be rulers will have to invent some other way to extort economic rents
from the people who create them, and at least we'll get a running start on
'em. :-). By the way, I include "physically safer", in my definition of
"cheaper and more efficient", above, so I don't think that Mad Max will
ride again when book-entry settlement goes away.
Mad Max, the collapse of order, perfect kidnappings, dogs and cats sleeping
together, what have you, are all just monsters under the bed, just like
cryptoanarchic utopias are wet dreams. Like Phil Agre has said a recent
paper called "Communities and Institutions", both kinds of phenomena are
caused by our inability to see the future of a given frontier and the
necessary projection of our emotions onto that blank space in order to plan
uses for it. I do it ten times before breakfast, myself. :-). Agre also
reminds us, however, that what eventually determined the American frontier
was not any dream of a "city on a hill", but money and commerce. New
technology, in the process of creating measurable, beneficial economic
effects in terms of human lifespan, health, and well-being, creates, in
turn, its own culture, something typically not determinable in advance.
So, physics causes economics, which causes law and thus politics. Not the
other way around. A politician can no more do something legally impossible
than he can do something economically or physically impossible. Reality is
not optional.
That's the lesson we should learn from Phil Z, and maybe from SecureOffice.
If it sells.
Cheers,
Bob Hettinga
-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
