[107258] in Cypherpunks
RE: Ruthless.com
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (bill.stewart@pobox.com)
Thu Jan 7 18:13:28 1999
From: bill.stewart@pobox.com
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 1999 14:19:45 -0800
To: Walter Burton <wburton@pipestream.com>,
"Lance J. Hoffman" <hoffman@SEAS.GWU.EDU>,
Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>,
cypherpunks <cypherpunks@cyberpass.net>
X-UPAS-Original-From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <013D438ED22ED2119F630060082F763C10D4B5@kenny.pipestream.co
m>
Reply-To: bill.stewart@pobox.com
At 05:14 PM 1/5/99 -0500, Walter Burton wrote:
>> It is, but you can expect that from Clancy. The book gets an
>> A for writing but a D for content.
>
>IMO, Tom Clancy's writing has always stunk. The man has no soul, voice,
>or ear for dialog. John LeCarre he ain't. He should be writing VCR manuals.
It was BAD. Bad, bad, bad.
I disagree with Walter Burton's view of Clancy's writing - he's often done
a good job of character development, and his plots generally have
some complexity to them, especially in his earlier books,
plus there's lots of weapons technogeek and militarygeek detail.
But he didn't write this; it was just farmed out to some hired hack.
The writing was bad, the plots were thin, the characters cardboard,
the thinking was weak, and the guy didn't bother doing any research on
the technical side.
Some of the books Clancy's farmed out in the past, while not as good
Clancy-material as the real stuff, have been at least decent escape-fiction.
This thing's so bad I'm susprised he's letting it walk around
with his name on it.
Robert Hettinga writes:
>With a back cover like that, it'll probably be a jingo-statist diatribe
>and Clipper apologia good enough to make even Dorothy Denning
>blow coffee out her nose, laughing so hard...
Yeah. I bought it as airplane reading, and have been too lazy
to write the book report, and my copy wasn't handy to bring on this trip :-)
In the book, the software market it dominated primarily by Bill Gates,
but secondarily by The Bad Guy, with Our Hero a somewhat distant third.
The Bad Guy is lobbying Congress to dump the crypto export laws, and
Our Hero does a heavily patriotic need-to-protect-US-from-Terrorists lobby,
and heavily promotes his key-escrow based software which becomes popular.
Various suspense novel things happen, Our Hero's private plane gets sabotaged
but they get lucky and don't quite get killed, etc.
The raid on the key escrow center was an important part, not only because
it's technically stupid, but it's also emphasizing domestic key escrow.
Our Hero's been so successful at selling his Patriotic Key Escrow software
that not only do foreign terrorists use it, but so do regular American
criminals, drug dealers, money launderers, tax evaders, porn merchants,
gamblers, and the like, so there's a routine everyday stream of
cops coming to the key escrow center to get keys. One day some routine-looking
cops show up with the routine paperwork to get keys of more perpetrators,
and as they're walking through the building to the vault, some red-shirted
clerk is in the wrong place at the wrong time and notices something wrong,
and GASP! They're FAKE COPS! and much shooting and running around occurs.
Will the Fake Cops steal or destroy the one and only copy of the database
before backup arrives? [I'll leave you in suspense here :-) ]
Now, anybody even vaguely technical would expect that they'd keep an
off-site backup copy in case the building burns down or somebody goofs up,
rather than leaving things so one raid can destroy it. You don't have
to be much more technical to expect they'd keep it encrypted,
and only retrieve the data they've got subpoenas or warrants for.
Secret sharing is a bit technical, but anybody who's paid attention
to key escrow should know that the NSA was at least pretending to
split Clipper keys so that you'd need to steal both halves.
Is this just a clueless pro-statist writer, or did he not want to
spoil one of the few available plot devices for this low-content story?
Or is he giving us the FBI flavor of key escrow, which doesn't
bother with the charade in the vault that Dorothy Denning described?
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
