Blah blah blah wrote... (Begin quote) "The down side is the concern that they will be doing something unusual. Since there is no mass use of PGP, crypto users do stand out - all 23,000 of us regular users worldwide are well mapped, charted and identified. I don't have a good answer for this. What novice users really want is ANONYMOUS use of crypto, so that they don't raise flags. Then I have to explain about anonymous remailers, whose reliability is nowhere near regular smtp e-mail. The only remaining option is use of public-access internet terminals." (End quote)
A point I was harping on a few weeks ago (but that seems to have been largely overlooked), is that if the amount of traffic that is encrypted rises exponentially, then those red flags will mean very little (I remember Homer Simpson designing a car and saying: "You know those little balls you put on your antenna to find your car in the mall parking lot? Every car should have one!"). One leverage point for possibly encouraging this to happen is in P2P, methinks. A few power-users have been prosecuted recently, so imagine a nice little crypto-tunnel (and mp3 disc-encryptor) app that could easily be injected into the Kazaa or other Gnutella-centric browsers. The nice thing here is that if we could get a functioning app, the app itself could be shared and spread variola-like via the P2P networks themselves. There's the technical difficulty that someone pointed out here that the IP address of both serv-ants is visible. One possible go-around is to have an encrypted tunnel materialize through blacknet, but I strongly doubt this will scale to millions of users very well. Another possibility includes allowing the user to make only a portion of their content visible to any single user (plus crypto of course), the logic being that 'they' won't come after the millions of regular file sharers. Any thoughts? If we could develop such an app and roll it over into the file-sharing networks, then the amount of encrypted files being moved around could increase tremendously. ANd then, us law-abiding, flag-saluting supporters of even this governments' insistence on world destabilisation will feel safer in using crypto on a daily basis, because crypto will no longer be the sole provence of cranks, kooks, and libertarians. -TD
