[5282] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: US Urges Ban of Internet Crypto
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Geer)
Thu Jul 29 15:41:45 1999
To: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 28 Jul 1999 22:50:49 EDT."
<199907290555.WAA22481@proxy3.ba.best.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 13:25:00 -0400
From: Dan Geer <geer@world.std.com>
> Secrecy is more useful to the weak than to the strong.
Governments everywhere hate privacy because the
efficiency of regulation is proportional to the
perfection of its surveillance.
Quoting the ever-prescient Phil Agre,
The global integration of the economy is ... commonly held to
decentralize political power by preventing governments from
taking actions that can be reversed through cross-border
arbitrage. But political power is becoming centralized in equally
important ways: the power of national governments is not so much
disappearing as shifting to a haphazard collection of
undemocratic and nontransparent global treaty organizations, and
the power to influence these organizations is likewise
concentrating in the ever-fewer global firms. These observations
are not pleasant or fashionable, but they are nonetheless true.
I submit that the mergers and acquisitions wave amongst
governments themselves (EU, NAFTA, China Inc) makes
governments everywhere a/the common enemy. Little
different than the middle ages where distant lands
with other customs may as well have not existed, and
the Church and the State were one and the same.
If we lose crypto, we must already have guns laid by.
--dan
