[46699] in Cypherpunks
Re: NSA says strong crypto to china??
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Timothy C. May)
Sun Jan 7 13:29:11 1996
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 1996 11:43:40 -0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
At 10:37 AM 1/7/96, Alex Strasheim wrote:
[On the rumor that the NSA is pushing to get strong crypto introduced into
China so as to destabilize the central authoritarian government.]
>If this is true, it's great news. It would mean that the NSA is adopting
>both cypherpunk analysis and tactics. Who would have thought? An NSA
>remade in Tim May's image.
First off, I'm not taking this report to be true. Could just be
misinterpretation of gubmentspeak.
Chuck Steele (or is it Steeler, I never seem to remember this) has been
pushing his notion of "open sources" and has probably influenced the
Washington axis more than I and others have. (He gives seminars, puts on
conferences, rubs shoulders, etc.)
>I'm skeptical about this story, but it would be a sensible policy for us
>to pursue. But not just with dissidents, and not just in China. We ought
>to try to create an environment in which people who want to do business
>need to have access to strong crypto in order to interoperate with the
>rest of the world. Pump high quality free tools out to the world, and
>push for solid standards for encrypted communications. And make sure
>those Chineese and Iraqi dissidents always have a safe way to post
>anonymously.
By the way, this is related to why I think you folks should all be
supporting the "flat tax" and similar proposals. (Especially the proposal
to end the double taxation of corporate income: tax the company and not the
individual shareholders, or vice versa, but don't first tax the income to
the corporation and then tax the distributed income/dividends/capital gains
again.)
(To head off the protestations from Duncan and others: even better, shrink
government to a minimal core, and dispense with taxes altogether. Fund the
remaining part of government in alternate ways (lotteries, sales of
currently-held national lands, etc.). But absent this, at least simplify
the tax code immensely, and flatten it.)
Why? Because the crypto anarchy notions we talk about makes collection of
taxes increasingly problematic. This goes back many centuries, to the days
when the King or Pharaoh sent his tax collectors out to inspect the
households of their citizen-units. Even then, finding the assets and
imputing income to the households was problematic, and invasive. Today, and
especially with strong crypto and all the developing methods we talk about,
how will the Ruler know what to tax?
(I believe that this issue is one of the motivations to restrict the use of
strong crypto and to make transactions monitorable. Not just
spot-monitoring, a la wiretaps, but monitorable in the way that banks must
report all transactions. This has particular significance for digital cash,
which I predict will only be "allowed" in forms that are transparently
auditable to the tax collectors.)
--Tim May
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
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: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
