Many people assume that technical people are unaware of the political implications of their work. This is not true and has never been true.
In my case I contacted Jock Gill who was running the Clinton-Gore '92 campaign and told him about the Web and the political potential in 1992, the day after I returned from the first public presentation at the CHEP'92 conference in France. I discussed the potential of the Web with people who were working in Sarajevo during the siege. They used a Web server there to coordinate information, for example reporting positions of snipers. I also had conversations with the intelligence services at the time. The cold war had just ended and they were looking for a new role. >From 1991 through 1998 there was an event that is generally known in the field as the cryptowars which began as a fight between the NSA and the Internet and ended with Louis Freeh the FBI backing the Republican party attempt to impeach Bill Clinton in revenge for the administration reneging on what Freeh believed was a commitment to back his surveillance ambitions. Some of us have experience of national politics as well. I was a (full not youth) delegate to a national party conference at 20. I gave up that activity because building the net is far more consequential than most cabinet level political careers. More specifically, when I started work on the Web 95% of the UK newspaper industry was controlled by three individuals, Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and Robert Maxwell. Conrad Black has recently completed a prison sentence for fraud, Maxwell committed suicide just before his massive fraud was exposed and the senior management a Rupert Murdoch UK newspaper are currently on trial. I really did not see why a conspicuously corrupt and dishonest Austrialian newspaper magnate should get to choose the UK government which is what Murdoch claimed in the wake of the '92 election. It is hard to imagine that the Iraq war could have occurred without support from Murdoch's global propaganda machine. He has the blood of a half million people on his hands. In the case of cryptography in particular and security in general, the technology affects the balance of power and is always controversial. When the IETF tried to do anti-spam work the efforts were initially sabotaged by a large number of shills paid by the spammers themselves. Even though 99.99% of net users hate spam there are some parties that made their livings from it and wanted to protect them. DRM is contentious for the same reason. It affects the balance of power between the producer of content and the consumer. Payment security mechanisms are contentious because some net merchants have built their reputations on being a safe place to buy from and they have little incentive to make trust a commodity.
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