Cypherpunks write code

When I joined the Cypherpunks mailing list some years ago, few people even
considered a legislative fix to the crypto issue. After all, crypto-anarchy
is incompatible with the legislative process. Cypherpunks couldn't care
less what happens in DC. They are banning crypto? What else is new?

Cypherpunks know that governments do not like crypto. As crypto-anarchy
spreads, they will like it even less. The attempt to get governments to
sanction crypto is therefore futile. In the end, all non-GAK crypto will be
banned.

But who cares? Cypherpunks write code! We know that we need to get the
tools out. Deployment wins.

So let's not get hung up on the events in DC. Don't call your Senator.
Don't waste time reading "policy posts". Write code!

We have monumental tasks ahead of us. Anon remailers exist today. A way of
reliably receiving anon email will be deployed this year. Web anonymizers
that truly conceal your identity are in limited beta. Fully anonymous ecash
will be available soon. DC nets should be deployed early next year. [But
don't let this stop you from working  on DC nets. Modern designs only
double the message bandwidth. This is very reasonable. We need more
implementations].

There is much work still to be done. We need stego front ends for many of
these services. And credentials need to be implemened. A task that hasn't
even been touched yet.

Cypherpunks write code,

--Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com>
  PGP encrypted mail preferred.
  DES is dead! Please join in breaking RC5-56.
  http://rc5.distributed.net/

Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> writes:

> When I joined the Cypherpunks mailing list some years ago, few people even
> considered a legislative fix to the crypto issue. After all, crypto-anarchy
> is incompatible with the legislative process. Cypherpunks couldn't care
> less what happens in DC. They are banning crypto? What else is new?
>
> Cypherpunks know that governments do not like crypto. As crypto-anarchy
> spreads, they will like it even less. The attempt to get governments to
> sanction crypto is therefore futile. In the end, all non-GAK crypto will be
> banned.
>
> But who cares? Cypherpunks write code! We know that we need to get the
> tools out. Deployment wins.
>
> So let's not get hung up on the events in DC. Don't call your Senator.
> Don't waste time reading "policy posts". Write code!
>
> We have monumental tasks ahead of us. Anon remailers exist today. A way of
> reliably receiving anon email will be deployed this year. Web anonymizers
> that truly conceal your identity are in limited beta. Fully anonymous ecash
> will be available soon. DC nets should be deployed early next year. [But
> don't let this stop you from working  on DC nets. Modern designs only
> double the message bandwidth. This is very reasonable. We need more
> implementations].
>
> There is much work still to be done. We need stego front ends for many of
> these services. And credentials need to be implemened. A task that hasn't
> even been touched yet.

I've been discussing off-line what I consider a good programming project
that would encourage the use of digital signatures and make Usenet more
usable than it is now.  If anyone wants to donate your time coding,
please let me know and I'll tell you what it's about. It's cool.

(If and when I find the time to write code for free, it'll be the spambot :-)

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

> But who cares? Cypherpunks write code! We know that we need to get the
> tools out. Deployment wins.
> 
> So let's not get hung up on the events in DC. Don't call your Senator.
> Don't waste time reading "policy posts". Write code!

This sums up my own sentiments entirely. People don`t realise that there 
is just no way to prevent a bill from passing if the government wants it 
to pass, and also I find the idea of bargaining with poloticians distasteful.

> We have monumental tasks ahead of us. Anon remailers exist today. A way of
> reliably receiving anon email will be deployed this year. Web anonymizers
> that truly conceal your identity are in limited beta. 

Does www.anonymizer.com run at a decent speed within the US? I tried to 
use it from here yesterday to get past the IP address cheching for the 
export page on www.netscape.com, and it was too slow (just stalled on 
about 1k)

        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

Paul Bradley writes:

> Does www.anonymizer.com run at a decent speed within the US? I tried to 
> use it from here yesterday to get past the IP address cheching for the 
> export page on www.netscape.com, and it was too slow (just stalled on 
> about 1k)

During its transition from C2 to Cyberpass, the anonymizer seems to have
acquired a long pause after the first block of each document.  Accounts
which permit you to use the anonymizer without the pause may be purchased
for a reasonable fee from the anonymizer's new owner. 

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     enoch@zipcon.com   $    via Finger                       $

Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk> writes:
> Does www.anonymizer.com run at a decent speed within the US? I tried
> to use it from here yesterday to get past the IP address cheching
> for the export page on www.netscape.com, and it was too slow (just
> stalled on about 1k)

Nice try, but it won't work.  anonymizer.com doesn't handle SSL
sessions, and the actual download part opens an SSL session for the
download.

I think this was discussed before, and the reason for no SSL sessions
was the CPU load this would add on anonymizer.com, IIRC.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

At 1:02 AM -0700 6/20/97, Lucky Green wrote:
>When I joined the Cypherpunks mailing list some years ago, few people even
>considered a legislative fix to the crypto issue. After all, crypto-anarchy
>is incompatible with the legislative process. Cypherpunks couldn't care
>less what happens in DC. They are banning crypto? What else is new?

Well said. And this latest round of laws is just what we expected when
Clipper was announced: the concern was never that certain government
agencies might have to replace their "STU" machines with a Clipperphone,
the concern from the beginning was mandatory use of Clipper-like key escrow
systems.

(At the risk of gaining another entry in the satires about how I said
something long in the past, I wrote a cautionary article in October 1992, 5
or 6 months before Clipper was announced, warning that Prof. Denning and
others were "floating trial balloons to ban crypto." How right I was.)


>Cypherpunks know that governments do not like crypto. As crypto-anarchy
>spreads, they will like it even less. The attempt to get governments to
>sanction crypto is therefore futile. In the end, all non-GAK crypto will be
>banned.

And the latest bill from McCain and Kerrey is the language pushed by
Clinton, so all speculation about whether Clinton will sign it when it
passes the Senate and House is moot. Further, the language closely
parallels the language we saw recently in the laws floated in the U.K.
(remember the "trusted third parties" document?) and in some  other
countries. That is, this McCain-Kerrey S.909 bill is just the
implementation of the OECD/David Aaron/GAK/New World Order/G8 deal to
outlaw cryptography use by citizen-units in the various "democratic" nation.

It is claimed by some that non-escrowed, non-GAKked, arbitrary strength
crypto remains legal for those who don't engage in commerce, who don't sign
the keys of others, who don't export,  etc.  Maybe. Certainly a lot of us
will continue to use the versions of PGP 5.x we *IMPORT* from Europe
(courtesy of the groups overseas now busily scanning and OCRing the source
code exported via FedEx by a Loyal Cypherpunk Who Has Chosen Not to Claim
Credit). Certainly we won't be using GAK.

But nearly anyone connected with a corporation will probably be told to use
a GAK product, to reduce potential liablility and criminality concerns.
This is the scenario Whit Diffie outlined several years ago at a
Cypherpunks meeting, that pressures would be applied so as to make
corporations and other such organizations the main enforcers of such
policies.

(No, there won't be 100% enforcement. But enough to have a chilling effect
on the development of some infrastructures Cypherpunks would like to see.
Certainly any sort of untraceable cash infrastructure will be in almost
immediate violation of the M-K bill, as it will be in U.K,, Germany,
France, Japan, and all the other OECD/G8 nations. Cypherpunks like us can
still "bootleg" some untraceably transactions, but not easily. And forget
about wide use. This is the desired effect of these new laws.)


>
>Cypherpunks write code,
>

OK, my chance here to piss off a few of you:

I think the "breaking of DES" challenge was, while interesting, a sideshow.
And utterly predictable, to anyone who read the 1977-78 papers on the
difficulty of breaking DES.

As with many Cypherpunks goals, I've been chagrinned to see so much
"backsliding" to lesser, less radical concerns. Recent meetings (that I've
been to) have been more dominated by "practical" issues of helping PGP,
Inc. out, of getting IETF agreement on some form of 3DES use, and on things
like the various challenges of known weak ciphers.

To quote Bill Stewart, "Foo on that!"

We are losing sight of the deeper issues, in my view.

The resources used to break DES, if as many people hosted remailers and
anonymizers on their machines, would further Cypherpunks goals a lot more
than breaking DES, which we all know was breakable (as we know what "56
bits" means).

(No, I will not make the usual error of assuming the resources used in
DESCHALL could be switched over to remailers and anonymizers....there are
many factors which went into why thousands of machines were volunteered,
and many or most of them are not applicable to the remailer situation. But
it is important to realize that "breaking DES' will have no lasting
effect....ironic, isn't it, that the M-K bill sailed through even despite
the same-day publicity surrounding the breaking of DES?)

We need to stop treating Cypherpunks meetings as marketing arms of
corporations, however "friendly" to us in some respects, and get back to
our more radical roots.

--Tim May

There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws.
Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!"
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1398269     | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

I saw a part of the PBS VietNam documentary last night, a (North)
Vietnamese general explaining that their defense against the folks with
helicopters was successful because it was never a purely military
strategy, instead always combining the political, the diplomatic and
the military.

What does this have to do with cypherpunks ?   A lot.

The recent unpleasantness in Washington, and Brussels, and London
has inspired many reminders that "Cypherpunks Write Code".
Amen to that -- and we clearly must hurry up and write more code now.
But we can and should do more.

We have long foreseen that the various Horsemen of the Apocalypse would be
used in the sound bite campaign to manufacture support for restrictions on
crypto.  No surprise then that we see this happening.  But there is still
time in this part of the battle, and an encouraging ripple effect of some
of our own political memes.  Many people in the US still remember the
abuses of J. Edgar Hoover, of Richard Nixon, or even Clinton's recent
abuse of FBI files; and these abuses are often mentioned along with the
lowest common denominator explanations of GAK in the mainstream media.
Much of the public in the Western Democracies retains a fuzzy belief in
freedom and privacy, and a fuzzy skepticism of Big Brother.

This is the political part of the battle, and the ranks of cypherpunks
include many people with skills in creating memes and sound bites.  Some
of these may not be coders at all, but they can contribute to the overall
strategy by inserting our own memes into the public's consciousness.  We
may not "win" on the political front alone, but even if the only
accomplishment is to delay the inevitable, this is very good in that it
allows the coders more time to write code.  Such effort is also rewarded
as it allows additional intelligent people to understand the issues and to
join us.  Cypherpunks write memes!

Finally, I will touch briefly on the dirtiest part of the effort -- the
diplomatic.  This has been discussed at length on this list and elsewhere.
The efforts by those who lobby and arm-twist and broker deals in
Washington, Brussels, London, and other nodes of power, may also
contribute to the overall strategy.  Again, we clearly will never "win"
outright in any such endeavors.  But I think it is clear that we again
gain time, breathing room, from such efforts -- time in which we may write
more code and write more memes.  If the lawmakers only hear from the
spooks and the secret police, they will pass their bad laws much sooner.

On Tue, 24 Jun 1997, Lou Poppler wrote:

> Cypherpunks write memes!

I like this. Writing effective program code -- computer instructions -- is
important, but so is writing effective language code. Language is
essentially another kind of "code" with its own set of interpreters etc. So
quite possibly the Horsemen "meme," a hardy, propogating viral code, could
be rendered useless when the right antiviral meme is introduced to the
datasphere. William S. Burroughs has already outlined language hacking
details in what I consider to be a seminal proto-cypherpunk text, _The
Electronic Revolution_. Long out of print, but online at
<http://www.hyperreal.com/wsb/elect-rev.html>. 

m

Michael Stutz
http://dsl.org/m/

On Fri, Jun 20, 1997 at 10:17:37AM -0700, Tim May wrote:
[...]
> 
> But nearly anyone connected with a corporation will probably be told to use
> a GAK product, to reduce potential liablility and criminality concerns.
> This is the scenario Whit Diffie outlined several years ago at a
> Cypherpunks meeting, that pressures would be applied so as to make
> corporations and other such organizations the main enforcers of such
> policies.

The mistake here is thinking that corporations need pressure. 
Instead, corporate authority structures are substantially equivalent
to government authority structures, and the same desire for control
that drives GAK operates within corporations.  Thus, corporations are,
underneath, eager accomplices, not covert champions of the cypherpunk
agend angrily bowing under pressure. 

> (No, there won't be 100% enforcement. But enough to have a chilling effect
> on the development of some infrastructures Cypherpunks would like to see.
> Certainly any sort of untraceable cash infrastructure will be in almost
> immediate violation of the M-K bill, as it will be in U.K,, Germany,
> France, Japan, and all the other OECD/G8 nations. Cypherpunks like us can
> still "bootleg" some untraceably transactions, but not easily. And forget
> about wide use. This is the desired effect of these new laws.)

Yep, that infrastructure will be chilled.  
[...]
> We need to stop treating Cypherpunks meetings as marketing arms of
> corporations, however "friendly" to us in some respects, and get back to
> our more radical roots.

Actually, I think we need to be more clever than that.  

-- 
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