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17. The Future
17.1. copyright
THE CYPHERNOMICON: Cypherpunks FAQ and More, Version 0.666,
1994-09-10, Copyright Timothy C. May. All rights reserved.
See the detailed disclaimer. Use short sections under "fair
use" provisions, with appropriate credit, but don't put your
name on my words.
17.2. SUMMARY: The Future
17.2.1. Main Points
- where things are probably going
17.2.2. Connections to Other Sections
17.2.3. Where to Find Additional Information
17.2.4. Miscellaneous Comments
17.3. Progress Needed
17.3.1. "Why have most of the things Cypherpunks talk about *not*
happened?"
+ Except for remailers and basic crypto, few of the main
ideas talked about for so long have actually seen any kind
of realization. There are many reasons:
A. Difficult to achieve. Both Karl Kleinpaste and Eric
Hughes implemented simple first-generation remailers in a
matter of _days_, but "digital cash" and "aptical
foddering," for example, are not quite so
straightforward. (I am of course not taking anything away
from Kleinpaste, Hughes, Helsingius, Finney, etc., just
noting that redirecting mail messages--and even
implementing PGP and things like delay, batching, etc.,
into remailers--is a lot easier conceptually than DC-Nets
and the like.
B. Protocols are confusing, tough to implement. Only a tiny
fraction of the "crypto primitives" discussed at Crypto
Conferences, or in the various crypto books, have been
realized as runnable code. Building blocks like "bit
commitment" have not even--to my knowledge--been
adequately realized as reusable code. (Certainly various
groups, such as Chaum's, have cobbled-together things
like bit commitment....I just don't think there's a
consensus as to the form, and this has limited the
ability of nonspecialists to use these "objects.")
C. Semantic confusion as well. While it's fairly clear what
"encrypting" or "remailing" means, just what is a
"digital bank"? Or a "reputation server"?
D. Interoperablity is problematic. Many platforms, many
operating systems, many languages. Again, remailers and
encryption work because there is a de facto lowest common
denominator for them: the simple text block, used in e-
mail, editors, input and output from programs, etc. That
is, we all mostly know exactly what an ASCII text block
is, and crypto programs are expected to know how to
access and manipulate such blocks. This largely explains
the success of PGP across many platforms--text blocks are
the basic element. Ditto for Cypherpunks remialers, which
operate on the text blocks found in most mail systems.
The situation becomes much murkier for things like
digital money, which are not standalone objects and are
often multi-party protocols involving time delays,
offline processing, etc.
E. Lack of an economic motive. We on this list are not being
paid to develop anything, are not assisted by anyone, and
don't have the financial backing of corporations to
assist us. Since much of today's "software development"
is actually _deal-making_ and _standards negotiation_, we
are left out of lots of things.
17.4. Future Directions
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..)
17.5. Net of the Future
17.5.1. "What role, if any, will MUDs, MOOs, and Virtual Realities
play?"
- "True Names," "Snow Crash," "Shockwave Rider"
- Habitat, online services
+ the interaction is far beyond just the canonical "text
messages" that systems like Digital Telephony are designed
to cope with
- where is the nexus of the message?
- what about conferences scattered around the world, in
multiple jurisdictions?
- crypto = glue, mortar, building blocks
- "rooms" = private places; issues of access control
- Unless cops are put into these various "rooms," via a
technology we can barely imagine today (agents?), it will
be essentially impossible to control what happens in these
rooms and places. Too many degrees of freedom, too many
avenues for exchange.
- cyberspaces, MUDs, virtual communities, private law,
untouchable by physical governments
17.5.2. keyword-based
- can be spoofed by including dictionaries
17.5.3. dig sig based (reputation-based)
17.5.4. pools and anonymous areas may be explicitly supported
17.5.5. better newsreaders, screens, filters
17.5.6. Switches
- "switching fabrics"
- ATM
- Intel's flexible mesh interconnects, iWARP, etc.
- all of these will make for an exponential increase in
degrees of freedom for remailer networks (labyrinths). On-
chip remailing is esentially what is needed for Chaum's
mixes. ATM quanta (packets) are the next likely target for
remailers.
17.5.7. "What limits on the Net are being proposed?"
- NII
+ Holding carriers liable for content
- e.g., suing Compuserve or Netcom
- often done with bulletin boards
- "We have to do something!"
+ Newspapers are complaining about the Four Horsemen of the
Infocalypse:
- terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money
launderers
+ The "L.A. Times" opines:
- "Designers of the new Information Age were inspired by
noble dreams of free-flowing data as a global
liberating force, a true democratizing agent. Sadly,
the crooks and creeps have also climbed aboard. The
time has come for much tighter computer security.
After all, banks learned to put locks on their vaults."
["L.A. Times," editorial, 1994-07-13]
17.6. The Effects of Strong Crypto on Society
17.6.1. "What will be the effects of strong crypto, ultimately, on
the social fabric?"
- It's hard to know for sure.
+ These effects seem likely:
- Starvation of government tax revenues, with concommitant
effects on welfare, spending, etc.
- increases in espioage
- trust issues
17.6.2. The revelations of surveillance and monitoring of citizens
and corporations will serve to increase the use of
encryption, at first by people with something to hide, and
then by others. Cypherpunks are already helping by spreading
the word of these situations.
- a snowballing effect
- and various government agencies will themselves use
encryption to protect their files and their privacy
17.6.3. People making individual moral choices
- people will make their own choices as to what to reveal,
what they think will help world peace, or the future, or
the dolphins, or whatever
- and this will be a liquid market, not just souls shouting
in the desert
- of course, not everything will be revealed, but the "mosaic
effect" ensures that mostly the truth will emerge
- every government's worst fear, that it's subjects will
decide for themselves what is secret, what is not, what can
be told to foreigners, etc.
17.7. New Software Tools and Programming Frameworks
17.7.1. Needed software
- Drop-in crypto modules are a needed development. As V.
Bontchev says, "it would be nice if disk encryption
software allowed the user to plug in their own modules.
This way everybody could use whatever they trust - MDC/SHA,
MDC/MD5, DES, IDEA, whatever." [V.B., sci.crypt, 1994-07-
01]
+ Robustness
- Security and robustness are often at odds
- Files that are wiped at the first hint of intrusion
(digital flash paper), remailer sites that go down at the
first signs of trouble, and file transmission systems
that split files into multiple pieces--any one of which
can be lost, thus destroying the whole transmission--are
not exactly models of robustness.
- Error correction usually works by decreasing entropy
through redundancy, which is bad for crypto.
- The military uses elaborate (and expensive) systems to
ensure that systems do not go down, keys are not lost,
etc. Most casual users of crypto are unwilling to take
these steps.
- And so keys are lost, passphrases are forgotten (or are
written down on Post-It Notes and taped to terminals),
and remailers are taken down when operators go on
vacation. All very flaky and non-robust.
- Look at how flaky mail delivery is!
+ A challenge is to create systems which are:
- robust
- not too complicated and labor-intensive to use
- where redundancy does not compromise security
+ Crypto workbench
- An overused term, perhaps, but one that captures the
metaphor of a large set of tools, templates, programming
aids, etc.
+ QKS and "Agents Construction Kit" (under development)
- along with Dylan, DylanAgents, Telescript, and probably
several other attempts to develop agent toolkits
- Henry Strickland is using "tcl" (sort of a scripting
language, like "perl") as a basis.
+ Software crisis
- tools, languages, frameworks, environments, objects,
class libraries, methods, agents, correctness,
robustness, evolution, prototyping
+ Connections between the software crisis and cryptography
- complex systems, complicated protocols
- price of being "wrong" can be very high, whether it's
an airport that can't open on time (Denver) or a
digital bank that has its assets drained in seconds
- agents, objects are hoped to be the "silver bullets"
+ The need for better software methodologies
- "silver bullets"
- failures, errors, flaws, methods
- provably correct designs? (a la Viper)
- It is often said that much better methodologies are
needed for _real time programming_, due to the time-
criticality and (probably) the difficulty of doing
realistic testing. But surely the same should be said
of _financial programming_, a la the banking and
digicash schemes that interest us so much.
- "the one aspect of software that most makes it the
flaky industry it is is that it is unusual for
practitioners to study the work of others. Programmers
don't read great programs. Designers don't study
outstanding designs. The consequences ... no, just look
for yourself. [Cameron Laird, comp.software-eng, 1994-
08-30]
+ Large Software Constructs
- The software crisis becomes particularly acute when
large systems are built, such as--to apply this to
Cypherpunks issues--when digital money systems and
economies are built.
17.7.2. Object-oriented tools
+ While tres trendy, some very real gains are being reported;
more than just a buzzword, especially when combined with
other tools:
- frameworks, toolkits
+ dynamic languages
- greater flexibility than with static, strongly-typed
langueages (but also less safety, usually)
- OpenStep, Visual Age, Visual Basic, Dylan, Telescript (more
agent-oriented), Lisp, Smalltalk, etc
17.7.3. Protocol Ecologies
- Behavioral simulations of agents, digital money, spoofing,
etc.
- the world in which Alice and Bob and their crypto friends
live
- defense, attack, spoofing, impersonation, theft
- elements that are cryptographically strong (like D-H key
exchanges), but combined in complex ways that almost have
to be simulated to find weaknesses
- "middle-out" instead of "top-down" (conventional, formal)
or "bottom-up" (emergent, A-LIFE)
- like Eurisko (Lenat), except oriented toward the domain of
financial agents
17.7.4. Use of autonomous agents (slaves?)
- "An advanced telecommunications environment offers a number
of ways to protect yourself against the problems involved
in dealing with anonymous entities in a situation in which
there is no monopoly Government.....When one's PBX finds
that one's call is not going through via a particular long
distance carrier, it automatically switches to another one.
It is easy to imagine one's intelligent agents testing
various sorts of transaction completions and switching
vendors when one fails. Professional checkers can supply
information on vendor status for a fee. After all, we don't
care if a company we are dealing with changes if its
service is unaffected." [Duncan Frissell, 1994-08-30]
17.7.5. Tools
+ "Languages within languages" is a standard way to go to
implement abstractions
- "Intermediate Design Languages" (IDLs)
- abstract concepts: such as "engines" and "futures"
- Lisp and Scheme have been favored languages for this
- other languages as well: Smalltalk, Dylan
+ For crypto, this seems to be the case: abstractions
represented as classes or objects
- with programming then the selective subclassing
- and sometimes gener
+ "type checking" of crypto objects is needed
- to ensure compliance with protocols, with forms expected,
etc.
- check messages for form, removal of sigs, etc. (analogous
to checking a letter before mailing for proper
addressing, for stamp, sealing, etc.)
- much of the nonrobustness of mail and crypto comes from
the problems with exception handling--things that a human
involved might be able to resolve, in conventional mail
systems
- "dead letter department"?
- Note: In the "Crypto Anarchy Game" we played in
September, 1992, many sealed messages were discarded for
being in the wrong form, lacking the remailer fee that
the remailer required, etc. Granted, human beings make
fairly poor maintainers of complex constraints....a lot
of people just kept forgetting to do what was needed. A
great time was had by all.
17.7.6. "What programming framework features are needed?"
- What follows are definitely my opnions, even more my own
opinions than most of what I've written. Many people will
disagree.
+ Needed:
- Flexibility over speed
- Rapid prototyping, to add new features
- Evolutionary approaches
- Robustness (provably correct would be nice, but...)
17.7.7. Frameworks, Tools, Capabilities
- Nearly all the cutting-edge work in operating systems, from
"mutually suspicious cooperating processes" to "deadlock"
to "persistence," show up in the crypto areas we are
considering.
+ Software of the Net vs. Software to Access the Net
- The Net--is current form adequate?
- Software for Accessing the Net
+ OpenDoc and OLE
- components working together, on top of various operating
systems, on top of various hardware platforms
+ Persistent Object Stores
- likely to be needed for the systems we envision
- robust, so that one's "money" doesn't evaporate when a
system is rebooted!
- interesting issues here...
- CORBA. OpenDoc, OLE II, SOM, DOE, Gemstone, etc.
+ Programming Frameworks
- Dynamic languages may be very useful when details are
fuzzy, when the ideas need exploration (this is not a
call for nondeterminism, for random futzing around, but a
recognition that the precise, strongly-typed approach of
some languages may be less useful than a rich,
exploratory environment. This fits with the "ecology"
point of view.
-
+ Connectivity
- needs to be more robust, not flaky the way current e-mail
is
- handshakes, agents, robust connections
- ATM, SONET, agents, etc....the "Net of the Future"
17.8. Complexity
17.8.1. The shifting sands of modern, complex systems
- lots of cruft, detail...changing..related to the "software
crisis"...the very flexibilty of modern software systems
promotes the frequent changing of features and behaviors,
thus playing hob with attempts of others to understand the
structure...evolution in action
- humans who use these systems forget how the commands work,
where things are stored, how to unsubscribe from lists,
etc. (This is just one reason the various sub-lists of our
list have seldom gotten much traffic: people use what they
are most used to using, and forget the rest.)
- computer agents (scripts, programs) which use these systems
often "break" when the underlying system changes. A good
example of this are the remailer sites, and scripts to use
them. As remailer sites go up and down, as keys change, as
other things change, the scripts must change to keep pace.
- This very document is another example. Scattered throughout
are references to sites, programs, sources, etc. As time
goes by, more and more of them will (inevitably) become
obsolete. (My hope is that enough of the pointers will
point to still-extant things so as to make the pointers
remain useful. And I'll try to update/correct the bad
pointers.)
17.8.2. "Out of Control"
- Kevin Kelly's book
- inability to have precise control, and how this is
consistent with evolution, emergent properties, limits of
formal models
- crypto, degrees of freedom
+ imagine nets of the near future
- ten-fold increase in sites, users, domains
- ATM switching fabrics..granularity of transactions
changes...convergence of computing and communications...
+ distributed computation ( which, by the way, surely needs
crypto security!)
- Joule, Digital Silk Road
- agents, etc.
+ can't control the distribution of information
+ As with the Amateur Action BBS case, access can't be
controlled.
- "The existance of gateways and proxy servers means that
there is no effective way to determine where any
information you make accessible will eventually end up.
Somebody in, say, Tennessee can easily get at an FTP
site in California through a proxy in Switzerland.
Even detailed information about what kind of
information is considered contraband in every
jurisdiction in the world won't help, unless every
*gateway* in the world has it and uses it as well."
[Stephen R. Savitzky, comp.org.eff.talk, 1994-08-08]
17.8.3. A fertile union of cryptology, game theory, economics, and
ecology
+ crypto has long ignored economics, except peripherally, as
an engineering issue (how long encryption takes, etc.)
- in particular, areas of reputation, risk, etc. have not
been treated as central idea...perhaps proper for
mathematical algorithm work
- but economics is clearly central to the systems being
planned...digital cash, data havens, remailers, etc.
+ why cash works so well...locality of reference, immediate
clearing of transactions, forces computations down to
relevant units
- reduces complaints, "he made me do it" arguments...that
is, increases self-responsibility...caveat emptor
+ game theory
+ ripe for treatment of "Alice and Bob" sorts of
situations, in which agents with different agendas are
interacting and competing
- "defecting" as in Prisoner's Dilemma
- payoff matrices for various behaviors
- evolutionary game theory
- evolutionary learning, genetic algorithms/programmming
- protocol ecologies
17.9. Crypto Standards
17.9.1. The importance of standards
- a critical role
+ Part of standards is validation, test suites, etc.
- validating the features and security of a remailer,
through pings, tests, performance tests, reliability,
etc.
- thus imposing a negative hit on those who fail
+ There are many ways to do this standards testing
- market reports (as with commercial chips, software)
- "seals of approval" (especially convenient with digital
sigs)
17.10. Crypto Research
17.10.1. Academic research continues to increase
17.10.2. "What's the future of crypto?"
- Predicting the future is notoriously difficult. IBM didn't
think many computers would ever be sold, Western Union
passed on the chance to buy Bell's telephone patents. And
so on. The future is always cloudy, the past is always
clear and obvious.
- We'll know in 30 years which of our cypherpunkish and
cryptoanarchist predictions came to pass--and which didn't.
17.10.3. Ciphers are somewhat like knots...the right sequence of moves
unties them, the wrong sequence only makes them more tangled.
("Knot theory" is becoming a hot topic in math and physics
(work of Vaughn Jones, string theory, etc.) and I suspect
there are some links between knot theory and crypto.)
17.10.4. Game theory, reputations, crypto -- a lot to be done here
- a missing link, an area not covered in academic cryptology
research
- distributed trust models, collusion, cooperation,
evolutionary game theory, ecologies, systems
17.10.5. More advanced areas, newer approaches
+ some have suggested quasigroups, Latin squares, finite
automata, etc. Quasigroups are important in the IDEA
cipher, and in some DES work. (I won't speculate furher
about an area I no almost nothing about....I'd heard of
semigroups, but not quasigroups.)
- "The "Block Mixing Transform" technology which I have
been promoting on sci.crypt for much of this spring and
summer is a Latin square technology. (This was part of
my "Large Block DES" project, which eventually produced
the "Fenced DES" cipher as a possible DES
upgrade.)....Each of the equations in a Block Mixing
Transform is the equation for a Latin square. The
multiple equations in such a transform together represent
orthogonal Latin squares. [Terry Ritter, sci.crypt, 1994-
08-15]
+ But what about for public key uses? Here's something Perry
Metzger ran across:
- ""Finte Automata, Latin arrays, and Cryptography" by Tao
Renji, Institute of Software, Academia Sinica, Beijing.
This (as yet unpublished) paper covers several
fascinating topics, including some very fast public key
methods -- unfortunately in too little detail. Hopefully
a published version will appear soon..." [P.M.,
sci.crypt, 1994-08-14]
17.10.6. Comments on crypto state of the art today vs. what is likely
to be coming
- Perry Metzger comments on today's practical difficulties:
"...can the difference between "crypto can be transforming
when the technology matures" and "crypto is mature now" be
that unobvious?....One of the reasons I'm involved with the
IETF IPSP effort is because the crypto stuff has to be
transparent and ubiquitous before it is going to be truly
useful -- in its current form its just junk. Hopefully,
later versions of PGP will also interface well with the new
standards being developed for an integrated secure message
body type in MIME. (PGP also requires some sort of scalable
and reverse mapable keyid system -- the current keyids are
not going to allow key servers to scale in a distributed
manner.) Yes, I've seen the shell scripts and the rest, and
they really require too much effort for most people -- and
at best, once you have things set up, you can now securely
read some email at some sites. I know that for myself,
given that I read a large fraction of my mail while working
at clients, where I emphatically do not trust the hardware,
every encrypted message means great inconvenience,
regardless." [Perry Metzger, 1994-08-25]
17.11. Crypto Armageddon? Cryptageddon?
17.11.1. "Will there be a "Waco in cyberspace"?"
- while some of us are very vocal here, and are probably
known to the authorities, this is not generally the case.
Many of the users of strong crypto will be discreet and
will not give outward appearances of being code-using
crypto anarchist cultists.
17.11.2. Attacks to come
- "You'll see these folks attacking anonymous remailers,
cryptography, psuedonymous accounts, and other tools of
coercion-free expression and information interchange on
the net, ironically often in the name of promoting
"commerce". You'll hear them rant and rave about
"criminals" and "terrorists", as if they even had a good
clue about the laws of the thousands of jurisdictions
criss-crossed by the Internet, and as if their own attempts
to enable coercion bear no resemblance to the practice of
terrorism. The scary thing is, they really think they
have a good idea about what all those laws should be, and
they're perfectly willing to shove it down our throats,
regardless of the vast diversity of culture, intellectual,
political, and legal opinion on the planet."
[<an50@desert.hacktic.nl> (Nobody), libtech-l@netcom.com,
1994-06-08]
+ why I'm not sanguine about Feds
- killing Randy Weaver's wife and son from a distance,
after trumped-up weapons charges
- burning alive the Koresh compound, on trumped-up charges
of Satanism, child abuse, and wife-insulting
- seizures of boats, cars, etc., on "suspicion" of
involvement with drugs
17.12. "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades"
17.12.1. Despite the occasionally gloomy predictions, things look
pretty good.No guarantees, of course, but trends that are
favorable. No reason for us to rest, though.
17.12.2. Duncan Frissell puts it this way:
- "Trade is way up. Wealth is way up. International travel
is way up. Migration is way up. Resource prices are the
lowest in human history. Communications costs are way
down. Electronics costs are way down. We are in a zero or
negative inflation environment. The quantity and quality
of goods and services offered on the markets is at an all-
time high. The percentage of the world's countries headed
by dictators is the lowest it's ever been.
"What all this means is that political philosophies that
depend on force of arms to push people into line, will
increasingly fail to work. Rich people with choices will,
when coerced, tend to change their investments and
business affairs into a friendlier form or to move to a
friendlier environment. Choice is real. If choices
exist, they will be made. An ever higher proportion of the
world's people will be "rich" in wealth and choice as the
years go on.
"Only a political philosophy that depends on the uncoerced
cooperation of very different people has a chance of
functioning in the future." [Duncan Frissell, 1994-09-09]
17.13. "Will cryptography really bring on the Millenium?"
17.13.1. Yes. And cats will move in with dogs, Snapple will rain from
the sky, and P will be shown unequal to NP.
17.13.2. Seriously, the implications of strong privacy, of
cyberspatial economies, and of borders becoming transparent
are enormous. The way governments do business is already
changing, and this will change things even more dramatically.
The precise form may be unpredictable, but certain end states
are fairly easy to predict in broad brush strokes.
17.13.3. "How do we know the implications of crypto are what I've
claimed?"
- We can't know the future.
- Printing, railroads, electrification
17.13.4. "When will it all happen? When will strong crypto really
begin to have a major effect on the economy?"
+ Stages:
- The Prehistoric Era. Prior to 1975. NSA and other
intelligence agencies controlled most crypto work.
Cryptography seen as a hobby. DES just starting to be
deployed by banks and financial institutions.
- The Research Era. 1975-1992. Intense interest in public
key discovery, in various protocols. Start of several
"Crypto" conferences. Work on digital money, DC-Nets,
timestamping, etc.
- The Activism Era. 1992--?? (probably 1998). PGP 2.0
released. Cypherpunks formed. Clipper announced--meets
firestorm of protest. EFF, CPSR, EPIC, other groups.
"Wired" starts publication. Digital Telelphony, other
bills. Several attempts to start crypto businesses are
made...most founder.
- The Transition Era. After about 1999. Businesses start.
Digital cash needed for Net transactions. Networks and
computers fast enough to allow more robust protocols. Tax
havens flourish. "New Underworld Order" (credit to Claire
Sterling) flourishes.
- It is premature to expect that the current environment--
technological and regulatory--will be beneficial to the
type of strong crypto we favor. Too many pieces are
missing. Several more advances are needed. A few more
failures are also needed (gulp!) to show better how not to
proceed.
17.13.5. "But will crypto anarchy actually happen?"
- To a growing extent, it already is happening. Look at the
so-called illegal markets, the flows of drug money around
the world, the transfer of billions of dollars a day on
mere "chop marks," and the thriving trade in banned items.
- "Grey and black capitalism is already a major component of
international cash flows....Once adequate user friendly
software is available, the internet will accellerate this
already existing trend....Crypto anarchy is merely the
application of modern tools to assist covert capitalism."
[James Donald, 1994-08-29]
- There are arguments that a Great Crackdown is coming, that
governments will shut down illegal markets, will stop
strong crypto, will force underground economies
aboveground. This is doubtful--it's been tried for the past
several decades (or more). Prohibition merely made crime
more organized; ditto for the War on (Some) Drugs.
17.13.6. "Has the point of no return been passed on strong crypto?"
- Actually, I think that in the U.S. at least, the point was
passed decades ago, possibly a century or more ago, and
that any hope of controlling strong crypto and private
communication evaporated long ago. Abuses by the FBI in
wiretapping Americans, and reports of NSA monitoring of
domestic communications notwithstanding, it is
essentially.....
17.14. Loose Ends
17.14.1. firewalls, virtual perimeters, swIPe-type encrypted tunnels,
an end to break-ins,
17.14.2. "What kind of encryption will be used with ATM?"
- (ATM = Asynchronous Transfer Mode, not Automated Teller
Machine)
- some reports that NSA is developing standards for ATM
17.14.3. Shapes of things to come, maybe....(laws of other countries)
+ India has a fee schedule for BBS operators, e.g., they have
to pay $50,000 a year to operate a bulletin board! (This
sounds like the urban legend about the FCC planning a modem
tax, but maybe it's true.)
- "The Forum for Rights to Electronic Expression (FREE) has
been formed in India as a body dedicated to extending
fundamental rights to the electronic domain....FREE owes
its creation to an attack on Indian datacom by the Indian
government, in the form of exorbitant licence fees (a
minimum Rs. 1.5 million = US$50,000 each year for a BBS,
much higher for e-mail)." [amehta@doe.ernet.in (Dr. Arun
Mehta), forwarded by Phil Agre, comp.org.cpsr.talk, 1994-
08-31]
- for more info: ftp.eff.org
/pub/EFF/Policy/World/India/FREE
17.14.4. Cyberspace will need better protection
- to ensure spoofing and counterfeiting is reduced (recall
Habitat's problems with people figuring out the loopholes)