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At 4:14 PM -0400 on 6/26/99, Sameer Parekh wrote:
> As far as I can tell Stuart Baker has realized that the time
> has come for crypto to be widespread.
Yup. F=MA, where M stands for money. :-). Digital commerce is financial
cryptography, financial crypto is strong crypto, and without strong
crypto there's no digital commerce. And all that.
> I don't really see him standing in the way of the PECSENC
> issuing a recommendation in either direction. At the last meeting I
> was at he was truly a facilitator, not an opinion leader.
Of course, lawyers are paid to be nice when they have to be, :-), but
when Stu came to talk to DCSB a couple(?) of years ago, he seemed not at
all like the "Smoking Man" picture we all had painted of him at the
time. Just a simple country lawyer out to make a buck. :-).
Stu said that at some point, say, three to five years before his DCSB
talk, whenever that was, the NSA had indeed seen the handwriting on the
wall about their inability to control the spread of strong cryptography
in a world of ubiquitous public internetworks, and decided that the only
thing left for them to do was to try to stall for as much time as they
could.
The best way to do that, Stu himself says he figured, was to tell Louie
Freeh, probably the only guy in history who had actually busted someone
using a telephone wiretap (the "Pizza Connection"
herion-and-pizza-parlor case, certain proof that criminals are indeed
dumb), that he (Louie) wouldn't get to play telephone with the bad guys
anymore if said pizza-barons had strong crypto.
And so, down Stu went, hat in hand, to hear him tell it, to the Hoover
Building. And, there, Stu let slip the dogs of war. If you can call J.
Edgar in a pink chenille dress, flounces, ruffles, and all, a
*war*-dog, anyway...
Since then, of course, Stu's been out in *private* practice, not
"public" practice (a pair of word combinations which together still make
me giggle), and the only actual crypto-law customers he can find are
people who want to *spread* cryptography, all so that the aforementioned
bad-guys won't steal their -- and, more important, their customers' --
money. Go figure.
As a result, Stu has now had the required deathbed conversion to the
idea that financial cryptography is the only cryptography that matters.
Imagine that.
Oh, well, that's why we live in a world where we have to hire sophists
to keep us out of jail and still have to deferentially refer to them
"counsellor", I guess. ;-).
Yet, all of this is as it should be, because, repeat after me, class,
"physics causes economics and economics causes law and 'policy'". Try to
do it the other way around, and you look like Hitler and eugenics. Or
Stalin and Lysenko's biology. Or Mao and Marx's economics. Or Carter and
Lovins' engineering. Or Gore and Gore's ecology.
Word to the wise, folks. In 2002, $1.1 *trillion* worth of transactions
will be executed on the internet, according to the most wild-ass
projection you can find out there. And, of course, every wild-ass
prediction like that so far has been short by at least one order of
magnitude.
If you can't imagine where all that money's going to actually come from,
remember that $4 trillion a *day* is still being moved around on
expensive proprietary networks, like SWIFT, or whatever, using
constipated old book-entry settlement methods. As opposed to the
ubiquitously cheap internet and instantaneous -- and less risky --
digital bearer settlement, of course. (Betcha can't tell what kind of
transactions *I* want to underwrite, can you? :-).)
Better living through financial cryptography, in other words.
The moral of the story, boys and girls, is that *political* cryptography
is dead. Political cryptography is military cryptography, obviously, it
is also, sadly, our personal favorite flavor of geek-promoted
"anti-spook" cryptography, as well.
In other words, and as ruthless as this sounds, if it don't make money
it won't sell, and if it won't sell, who cares about it, anyway?
Fortunately for freedom-loving cryptogeeks everywhere, where actual
money is involved, the stronger the financial cryptography, the better
the market likes it. And, oddly enough, we haven't put *actual* money on
the net yet, just instructions to move money from one bank account to
another.
That's about to change. And, when it does, political cryptography will
be a doe in the headlamp of an express-train called financial
cryptography, high-balling down that intercontinental express track
called the public internetwork.
Bambi meets Mozilla, if you will.
F = MA.
Cheers,
RAH
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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Digital Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
