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Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

> The paper has the same title as a 2017 draft paper

Not quite the same title. He has papers with similar titles since at least 2010.

I wanted to say thanks - this document linked to on his wikipedia page was unexpectedly fascinating! NSA, patents, conspiracies..

https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=95280154624588&w=2

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I was surprised to see, in the 1999 email you linked, that NSA mass surveillance was already widely known, before the NSA ramp up from 9/11 and before the Snowden disclosures.

> Actually, I don't think of the NSA's plots to deny everyone but themselves (and those they dub worthy) access to strong un-GAKed commercial cryptography as a conspiracy, per se. NSA officials acted upon a fairly open if Byzantine strategy. It was hatched by men who obviously believe that Western liberal society is best safeguarded if the US can continue to gleen the benefits of the huge passive eavesdropping net that has for decades sustained America's geo-political dominance.

At the time ECHELON was well-known among hacker and conspiracy circles, and it was making big news overseas due to major disclosures by partner governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

James Bamford wrote a lot of books on the nsa before 9/11.

I've been aware of the Emacs function 'spook'[1] since the late 90s.

Here's a current output from `M-x spook` on my machine:

> Europol BATF bluebird secure Narco banners Blister agent BVD fraud SADMS UKUSA mania weapons of mass destruction Virii EDI Bin Laden

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma...

> The idea is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the agencies will get so busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all.

Wow - so quaint!

> I was surprised to see, in the 1999 email you linked, that NSA mass surveillance was already widely known, before the NSA ramp up from 9/11 and before the Snowden disclosures.

Exactly. But before the Snowden leaks hardly anyone in the mainstream believed or listened to these "conspiracist" hacker/cypherpunk dudes.

I recently rewatched the movie "Enemy of the State" from 1998.

Money quotes:

>The government's been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties. They've infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls... Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It's a brave new world out there.

>Fort Meade has 18 acres of mainframe computers underground. You're talking to your wife on the phone and you use the word "bomb", "president", "Allah", any of a hundred keywords, the computer recognizes it, automatically records it, red-flags it for analysis. That was 20 years ago.

If you want a “spiritual predecessor”, go watch “The Conversation”. Amazing film.

it was widely known that they were At It, but things like "they undetectably tap fibres" or "AT&T would allow mass tee-ing of traffic" were considered a bit fringe-y, in my recollection. and of course turned out to be true and not even in the most extreme of their operations.

Here is a little background on one of those fringe theories that turned out to be true. Not pre-9/11, but pre-Snowden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Be careful, cypherpunks is a fascinating rabit hole; you can easily fall in and forever alter your perspective.

There’s a ton of material on that site- any other lists you can recommended exploring?

You could do worse than reading the book, which is an interview with some key players:

https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/

Or this:

https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/getting-started/what-is-the-cyphe...

Thanks, looks great. It's by Julian Assange and a few others. First words of the book:

"What is a Cypherpunk?

Cypherpunks advocate for the use of cryptography and similar methods as ways to achieve societal and political change. Founded in the early 1990s, the movement has been most active during the 1990s “cryptowars” and following the 2011 internet spring. The term cypherpunk, derived from (cryptographic) cipher and punk, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006"

So I thought, hmm that sounds like the crypto-anarchy that was discussed on HN the other day. And your 2nd link has a page on that[1]. Indeed they sound like the same idea – one is the people, the other is the system they want. Cyber-equality. Defined, rather, by the system they don't want: the powerful able to read the communications of the less powerful, but not vice versa.

Is there anyone (openly) arguing this would be a bad thing? (Also I'm wondering why I've heard about bitcoin/blockchain a million times but didn't even know what these words meant!)

[1] https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/getting-started/what-is-a-cypherp...

The American and Australian governments have both advocated strongly, recently, for the ability of law enforcement to decrypt civilian communications. Of course, there's plenty of other countries that would desire this imbalance of power, as well.

Examples:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/10/12/us-government-ca...

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/21/805032627/trump-administratio...

> Is there anyone (openly) arguing this would be a bad thing?

I guess you missed the EARN IT bill last year? It happens so often I've lost track of it. The EFF and various organizations have to push for it every year, it's disheartening. At this point I think we need a constitutional amendment for encryption, but I'm not sure if the public sentiment is right for that now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

Thanks for the link. Am Australian (like Assange), not in USA – sounds like you are, and am assuming I am too.

Also, I guess I meant, is there anyone aside from those in power arguing for it!

For sure -- and I appreciate the clarification.

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