Doomed to repeat history? Lessons from the crypto wars of the 1990s (2015) [pdf]

http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/cacm92nov.html

I was a member of DC CypherPunks, with Declan McCullagh. I got to meet Whitfield Diffie. I saw EFF and EPIC and other such organizations get created.

I was just a tiny fly on that wall, but it was clear what we were up against at the time, and how things have just gotten worse since then.

Back then, the crazies were worried about these things called RFID strips that were supposedly embedded in all the money, so that the government could track you wherever they wanted.

Today, we all carry around phones broadcasting Bluetooth or wifi MAC addresses or RFID tags to tell us where we lost our keys, and we give them so much more information than could ever have been gathered by the claimed RFID strips.

I find the 180 degree shift in meaning of many words, phrases, and even political positions over the last 7 years to be fascinating.

https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 [1]

1. "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration.

On the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a lawyer in private practice named Stewart Baker who had been chief council to the National Security Agency, our listeners, and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became, later on, the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and has much to do with what happened in our network after 2001.

At any rate, the four of us spent two pleasant hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end there was a little dinner party at the Harvard faculty club, and at the end, after all the food had been taken away and just the port and the walnuts were left on the table, Stuart said, “All right, among us now that we are all in private, just us girls, I’ll let our hair down.”

He didn’t have much hair even then, but he let it down.

“We are not going to prosecute your client, Mr. Zimmermann," he said. “Public key encryption will become available. We fought a long, losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic.” And then he looked around the room and he said, ”But nobody cares about anonymity, do they?"

And a cold chill went up my spine and I thought, all right, Stuart, and now I know you’re going to spend the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and we’ll see how it goes.

And it’s going badly. We didn’t build the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake. Now we are paying for it." -Eben Moglen

Given how prevalent quiet aquisence is in the tech community about mass surveillance, I think the mistake is going to be anonymity, and other user rights and freedoms foundations, including crypto. We already see it happening with crypto, but please remember the real war is on computing freedom. These other things are a subset.