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At 1:06 PM -0400 on 10/17/00, [EMAIL PROTECTED] forwards from Fox
News:
> # The U.S. National Security Agency wants to do battle in
> cyberspace.
Marvellous. But they'll have to get in line behind every corporate IT
department, as people like Whitfield Diffie have already observed.
"Infowar" will be -- is being -- fought by business, because government
in this sphere is too damned slow -- too expensive -- to be of much use
there.
Put another way, it won't be the NSA which does our computer security,
and, if any third party does it at all, it'll be firms like Counterpane
and L0pht/@Stake, operating like those fictional private protection
"rackets" in Vernor Vinge's anarcho-capitalist chestnut novella _The
Ungoverned_.
All of which proves, once again, that financial, not political,
cryptography is the only crypto that really matters.
Speaking of finance, :-), I'm reading a book about the Medici at the
moment, and that reminds me of something almost pertinant, here: the Pope
had troops once, too. In fact, in a manner of speaking, he still does, in
the form of the Swiss Guards. Note, of course othogonally, that
Switzerland itself hasn't gone to war much either, lately, any more than
the Vatican has. Even the Knights Hospitaler "control" a few hundred
square yards of floorspace, speaking of the Vatican.
Anyway, just like the Pope's "troops" can only manage to guard the
Vatican, so too will government computer security apparatchiks only be
able to guard a given government's own systems, and not much of those of
it's "faithful".
It would cost too much in real economic terms to do, and, like "buying"
force from nation-states is cheaper than it is from one's religious
denomination, buying computer security is cheaper in the private market
than it ever will be obtainable from any nation-state. Dan Geer's
observation of a firm's borders as the symmetric/asymmetric key boundary,
and of course, Coase's theorem of transaction cost and firm size are
probably two really good theoretical reasons for this.
Force itself may be cheaper from private-non-monopolistic markets someday
as well, but that's beside my point, here, except that they'll both be
results of Moore's law and its effect not only on the information costs
of price discovery, but on the mechanical, risk adjusted costs of
transactions themselves, through internet bearer transactions.
Just like the Swiss Guards -- or, more properly, like Neal Stephenson's
"FEDS" in _Snow Crash_ who, after all, were just another franchise -- the
NSA will eventually only be able to "patrol" the cypherspace boundries of
its own installations, and not much further.
Of course, like the Medici popes, they might be able to thrash around in
cypherspace a whole bunch before they stop actually trying to do so...
Cheers,
RAH
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--
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Internet 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'
