17.4.1. "What are some future directions?"
17.4.2. The Future of the List
+ "What can be done about these situations?"
- That is, given that the Cypherpunks list often contains
sensitive material (see above), and given that the
current membership list can be accessed by..... what can
be done?
- Move central server to non-U.S. locale
- Or to "cyberspace" (distributed network, with no central
server...like FidoNet)
- subscribers can use pseudonyms, cutouts, remailers
17.4.3. What if encryption is outlawed?
- can uuencode (and similar), to at least slow down the
filter programs a bit (this is barely security through
obscurity, but....)
- underground movements?
- will Cypherpunks be rounded up?
17.4.4. "Should Cypherpunks be more organized, more like the CPSR,
EFF, and EPIC?"
- Those groups largely are lobbying groups, with a staff in
Washington supported by the membership donations of
thousands or tens of thousands of dues-paying members. They
perform a valuable service, of course.
- But that is not our model, nor can it plausibly be. We were
formed as an ad hoc group to explore crypto, were dubbed
"Cypherpunks," and have since acted as a techno-grasssroots
anarchy. No staff, no dues, no elections, no official rules
and regulations, and no leadership beyond what is provided
by the power of speech (and a slight amount of "final say"
provided by the list maintainer Eric Hughes and the machine
owner, John Gilmore, with support from Hugh Daniel).
- If folks want a lobbying group, with lawyers in Washington,
they should join the EFF and/or CPSR.
- And we fill a niche they don't try to fill.
17.4.5. Difficult to Set Directions
- an anarchy...no centralized control
- emergent interests
- everyone has some axe to grind, some temporary set of
priorities
- little economic motivation (and most have other jobs)
17.4.6. The Heart and Soul of Cypherpunks?
+ Competing Goals:
+ Personal Privacy
- PGP, integration with mailers
- education
+ Reducing the Power of Institutions
- whistelblowers group
-
- Crypto Anarchy
+ Common Purposes
+ Spreading strong crypto tools and knowledge
- PGP
+ Fighting government restrictions and regulations
- Clipper/Skipjack fight was a unifying experience
+ Exploring new directions in cryptology
- digital mixes, digital cash, voting
17.4.7. Possible Directions
+ Crypto Tools...make them ubiquitous "enough" so that the
genie cannot be put back in the bottle
- can worry about the politics later (socialists vs.
anarchocapitalists, etc.) (Although socialists would do
well to carefully think about the implications of
untraceable communications, digital cash, and world-wide
networks of consultants and workers--and what this does
to tax collection and social spending programs--before
they work with the libertarians and anarchocapitalists to
bring on the Crypto Millenium.)
+ Education
- educating the masses about crypto
- public forums
- this was picked by the Cambridge/MIT group as their
special interest
+ Lobbying
- talking to Congressional aides and committee staffers,
attending hearings, submitting briefs on proposed
legislation
- coordinating with EFF, CPSR, ACLU, etc.
- this was picked by the Washington group as their special
interest, which is compellingly appropriate (Calif. group
is simply too far away)
- Legal Challenges
+ mixture of legal and illegal
- use legal tools, and illegal tools
- fallback positions
- enlist illegal users as customers...help it spread in
these channels (shown to be almost uncontrollable)
17.4.8. Goals (as I see them)
+ Get strong crypto deployed in such a way as to be
unstoppable, unrecallable
- "fire and forget" crypto
- genie out of the bottle
- Note that this does _not_ necessarily that crypto be
_widely_ deployed, though that's generally a good idea.
It may mean seeding key sites outside the U.S. with
strong crypto tools, with remailers, and with the other
acouterments.
+ Monkeywrench threats to crypto freedom.
- economic sabotage of those who use statist contracts to
thwart freedom (e.g., parts of AT&T)
+ direct sabotage
- someday, viruses, HERF, etc.
17.4.9. A Vision of the Future
- encrypted, secure, untraceable communications
- hundreds of remailers, in many countries
- interwoven with ordinary traffic, ensuring that any attempt
to quash crypto would also have a dramatic effect on
business
- data havens, credit, renters, etc.
- information markets
- ability to fight wars is hindered
- U.S. is frantic, as its grip on the world loosens...Pax
Americana dies
17.4.10. Key concepts are the way to handle the complexity of crypto
- The morass of protocols, systems, and results is best
analyzed, I think, by not losing sight of the basic
"primitives," the things about identity, security,
authentication, etc. that make crypto systems work the way
they do.
+ Axiom systems, with theorems and lemmas derivable from the
axioms
- with alternate axioms giving the equivalent of "non-
Euclidean geometries" (in a sense, removing the physical
identity postulate and replacing it with the "the key is
the identity" postulate gives a new landscape of
interactions, implications, and structures).
- (Markets, local references, voluntary transactions, etc.)
- (ecologies, predators, defenders, etc.)
- (game theory, economics, etc..)
By Tim May, see README
HTML by Jonathan Rochkind