Cypherpunks, e-money and the technologies of disconnection - encryption technology; includes related articles; excerpt from book, 'Out of Control'

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1993 by Kevin Kelly

To create digital anonymity, the cypherpunks have developed about fifteen prototype versions of an anonymous remailer that would, when fully implemented, make it impossible to determine the source of an possible to determine the source of an email message, even under intensive monitoring of communication lines. One stage of the remailer works today. When you use it to mail Alice, she gets a message from you that says it is from "nobody." Unraveling where it came from is trivial for any computer capable of monitoring the entire network -- a feat few can afford. But to be mathematically untraceable, the remailers have to work in a relay of at least two (more is better) -- one remailer handing off a message to the next remailer, diluting information about its source to nothing as it is passed along.

Eric Hughes sees a role for digital pseudonymity -- your identity is known by some but not by others. When cloaked pseudonymously, "You could join a collective to purchase some information and decrease your actual cost by orders of magnitude -- that is, until it is almost free." A digital co-op could form a private online library and collectively purchase digital movies, albums, software, and expensive newsletters, which they would "lend" to each other over the net. The vendor selling the information would have absolutely no way of determining whether he was selling to one person or five hundred. Hughes sees these kinds of arrangements peppered into an information-rich society as "increasing the margins where the poor can survive."

"One thing for sure," Tim says, "long term, this stuff nukes tax collection." I venture the rather lame observation that this may be one reason the government isn't handing the technology back. I also offer the speculation that an escalating arms race with a digital IRS might evolve. For every new avenue the digital underground invents to disguise transactions, the digital IRS will counter with a surveillance method. Tim pooh-poohs the notion. "Without a doubt, this stuff is unbreakable. Encryption always wins."

The Fax Effect

Encryption always wins because it follows the logic of the net. A given public-key encryption key can eventually be cracked by a supercomputer working on the problem long enough. Those who have codes they don't want cracked try to stay ahead of the supercomputers by increasing the length of their keys (the longer a key is the harder it is to crack) -- but at the cost of making the safeguard more unwieldy and slow to use. However, any code can be deciphered, given enough time or money. As Eric Hughes often reminds fellow cypherpunks, "Encryption is economics. Encryption is always possible, just expensive." It took A. Shamir a year to break a 120-digit key using a network of distributed Sun workstations working part-time. A person could use a key so long that no supercomputer could crack it for the foreseeable future, but it would be awkward to use in daily life. A buildingful of NSA's specially hotrodded supercomputers might take a day to crack a 140-digit code today. But that is a full day's commitment of big iron to open just one lousy key!