CRIME New rant on crypto from Bruce Sterling

From: Toby Kohlenberg (toby@private)
Date: Tue Dec 04 2001 - 00:17:27 PST

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    http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/251-300/00283_geeks_and_spooks.html
    
    I think the funniest part I've found so far is:
    
      That is the ISLANDS IN THE NET scenario: where the sinister digital
    underground takes over some penny-ante country like Grenada, and we make
    every form of piracy locally legal there, and then we just run up our
    black skull-and-crossbones on the website, and we start selling WINDOWS
    for nine dollars ninety-five cents. We'll encrypt every bit of data going
    in and out, so nobody will even know what we're up to! We'll have these
    key-sharing digital networks of trust, where all the cool people will have
    our crypto power-handshake, and it'll be like it was when we were selling
    pot to each other in the dorm in Berkeley, only, like, on a cosmic scale.
    
      And this is where it just starts to get good, because we rebel
    crypto-fiends will be exchanging messages, and conducting all kinds of
    business, and negotiating electronic contracts, with people we don't even
    know and who we're even never gonna know. If we need a hundred kilos of
      black tar opium, we just hit the F1 function key, and some guy from
    Sinaloa or Medellin or the Northern Alliance, whom we know only as QX5773
    at blacknet dot org, he accepts our anonymous electronic funny money, and
    he ships the drugs to us to a dead drop in a giant freight container,
    along with some illegal refugees, and some pirated Gucci handbags, and all
    the stolen UNIX code we can eat! It's crypto paradise! For we have created
    a totally liquid market for any and all material which can be put into
    words and pictures: books, movies, computer games, trade secrets,
    government secrets, business software; it'll all be sucked down into the
    black hole of the churning crypto mill, and the State will wither away.
    Wow!
    
    
    That said, he actually has some good things to say and it is an
    interesting read.
    
    toby
    



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