Consider that this article was written before the internet. Read it
and you will discover just how prescient that it is. Also make the
effort to grasp some of the mathematics described here. This is
embedded in most of the data flow out there. This is why the
internet will remain largely free and can only be stifled for a
while here and there.
Of course the real protection comes from the mere mass of data.
Today I could embed a message inside the library of congress and use
this encryption technique to ship the data. While I am at it, I may
as well use it to simultaneously send scads of messages with
individually separate codings. Let us go crazy. The point is to
swamp surveillance. That is why wire tap evidence crashed and burned
as an effective tool. The courts found themselves obliged to listen
to days of rubbish unrelated to the issue at hand in the event it may
be pertinent. It makes perfectly good intelligence but challenging
evidence by itself.
This item is well worth the read.
From Crossbows To
Cryptography:
Techno-Thwarting The
State
Chuck Hammill
Future of Freedom
Conference, November 1987
Public Domain:
Duplicate and Distribute Freely
You know,
technology—and particularly computer technology—has often gotten
a bad rap in Libertarian circles. We tend to think of Orwell’s
1984, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, or the proximity detectors keeping
East Berlin’s slave/citizens on their own side of the border, or
the sophisticated bugging devices Nixon used to harass those on his
“enemies list.” Or, we recognize that for the price of a ticket
on the Concorde we can fly at twice the speed of sound, but only if
we first walk through a magnetometer run by a government policeman,
and permit him to paw through our belongings if it beeps.
But I think that
mind-set is a mistake. Before there were cattle prods, governments
tortured their prisoners with clubs and rubber hoses. Before there
were lasers for eavesdropping, governments used
binoculars and
lip-readers. Though government certainly uses technology to oppress,
the evil lies not in the tools but in the wielder of the tools.
In fact, technology
represents one of the most promising avenues available for
re-capturing our freedoms from those who have stolen them. By its
very nature, it favors the bright (who can put it to use) over the
dull (who cannot). It favors the adaptable (who are quick to see the
merit of the new) over the sluggish (who cling to time-tested ways).
And what two better words are there to describe government
bureaucracy than “dull” and “sluggish”?
One of the clearest,
classic triumphs of technology over tyranny I see is the invention of
the man-portable crossbow. With it, an untrained peasant could now
reliably and lethally engage a target out to fifty meters – even
if that target were a mounted, chain-mailed knight. Unlike the
longbow, which, admittedly was more powerful, and could get off more
shots per unit time, the crossbow required no formal training to
utilize. Whereas the longbow required elaborate visual, tactile and
kinesthetic coordination to achieve any degree of accuracy, the
wielder of a crossbow could simply put the weapon to his shoulder,
sight along he arrow itself, and be reasonably assured of hitting his
target.
Moreover, since just
about the only mounted knights likely to visit your average peasant
would be government soldiers and tax collectors, the utility of the
device was plain: With it, the common rabble could defend themselves
not only against one another, but against their governmental masters.
It was the medieval equivalent of the armor-piercing bullet, and,
consequently, kings and priests (the medieval equivalent of a Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Crossbows) threatened death and
excommunication, respectively, for its unlawful possession.
Looking at later
developments, we see how technology like the firearm—particularly
the repeating rifle and the handgun, later followed by the Gatling
gun and more advanced machine guns – radically altered the balance
of interpersonal and inter-group power. Not without reason was the
Colt .45 called “the equalizer.” A frail dance-hall hostess with
one in her possession was now fully able to protect herself against
the brawniest roughneck in any saloon. Advertisements for the period
also reflect the merchandising of the repeating cartridge rifle
by declaring that “a man on horseback, armed with one of these
rifles, simply cannot be captured.” And, as long as his captors
were relying upon flintlocks
or single-shot rifles,
the quote is doubtless a true one.
Updating now to the
present, the public-key cipher (with a personal computer to run it)
represents an equivalent quantum leap—in a defensive weapon. Not
only can such a technique be used to protect sensitive data in one’s
own possession, but it can also permit two strangers to exchange
information over an insecure communications channel—a wiretapped
phone line, for example, or skywriting, for that matter)—without
ever having previously met to exchange cipher keys.
With a thousand-dollar
computer, you can create a cipher that a multimegabuck CRAY X-MP
can’t crack in a year. Within a few years, it should be
economically feasible to similarly encrypt voice communications; soon
after that, full-color digitized video images. Technology will not
only have made wiretapping obsolete, it will have totally demolished
government’s control over information transfer.
I’d like to take
just a moment to sketch the mathematics which makes this principle
possible. This algorithm is called the RSA algorithm, after Rivest,
Shamir, and Adleman who jointly created it. Its security derives from
the fact that, if a very large number is the product of two very
large primes, then it is extremely difficult to obtain the two prime
factors from analysis of their product. “Extremely” in the sense
that if primes p and q have 100 digits apiece, then their 200-digit
product cannot in general be factored in less than 100 years by the
most powerful computer now in existence.
The “public” part
of the key consists of (1) the product pq of the two large primes p
and q, and (2) one factor, call it x, of the product xy where xy =
(p1)(q 1) + 1. The “private” part of the key consists of the
other factor y.
Each block of the text
to be encrypted is first turned into an integer—either by using
ASCII, or even a simple A=01, B=02, C=03, ..., Z=26 representation.
This integer is then raised to the power x mod(pq) and the resulting
integer is then sent as the encrypted message. The receiver decrypts
by taking this integer to the (secret) power y mod(pq).
It can be shown that
this process will always yield the original number started with.
What makes this a
groundbreaking development, and why it is called “public- key”
cryptography, is that I can openly publish the product pq and the
number x, while keeping secret the number y—so that anyone can send
me an encrypted message, namely a x mod(pq), but only I can recover
the original message a, by taking what they send, raising it to the
power y and taking the result mod(pq). The risky step (meeting to
exchange cipher keys) has been eliminated. So people who may not even
trust each other enough to want to meet, may still reliably exchange
encrypted messages—each party having selected and disseminated his
own pq and his x, while maintaining the secrecy of his own y.
Another benefit of
this scheme is the notion of a “digital signature,” to enable one
to authenticate the source of a given message. Normally, if I want to
send you a message, I raise my plaintext a to your x and take the
result mod(your pq) and send that.
However, if in my
message, I take the plaintext a and raise it to my (secret) power y,
take the result mod(my pq), then raise that result to your x mod(your
pq) and send this, then even after you have normally “decrypted”
the message, it will still look like garbage. However, if you then
raise it to my public power x, and take the result mod(my pubic pq),
so you will not only recover the original plaintext message, but you
will know that no one but I could have sent it to you (since no one
else knows my secret y).
And these are the very
concerns by the way that are today tormenting the Soviet Union about
the whole question of personal computers.
On the one hand, they
recognize that American schoolchildren are right now growing up with
computers as commonplace as sliderules used to be—more so, in fact,
because there are things computers can do which will interest (and
instruct) 3- and 4-year-olds. And it is precisely these students who
one generation hence will be going head-to-head against their Soviet
counterparts. For the Soviets to hold back might be a suicidal as
continuing to teach swordsmanship while your adversaries are learning
ballistics. On the other hand, whatever else a personal computer may
be, it is also an exquisitely efficient copying machine—a floppy
disk will hold upwards of 50,000 words of text, and can be copied in
a couple of minutes. If this weren’t threatening enough, the
computer that performs the copy can also encrypt the data in a
fashion that is all but unbreakable. Remember that in Soviet society
publicly accessible Xerox machines are unknown. The relatively few
copying machines in existence are controlled more intensively than
machine guns are in the United States.
Now the “conservative”
position is that we should not sell these computers to the Soviets,
because they could use them in weapons systems.
The “liberal”
position is that we should sell them, in the interests of mutual
trade and cooperation—and anyway, if we don’t make the sale,
there will certainly be some other nation willing to.
For my part, I’m
ready to suggest that the Libertarian position should be to give them
to the Soviets for free, and if necessary, make them take them... and
if that doesn’t work load up an SR-71 Blackbird and air drop them
over Moscow in the middle of the night. Paid for by private
subscription, of course, not taxation...
I confess that this is
not a position that has gained much support among members of the
conventional left-right political spectrum, but, after all, in the
words of one of Illuminatus’s characters, we are political
non-Euclideans: The shortest distance to a particular goal may not
look anything like what most people would consider a “straight
line.” Taking a long enough world-view, it is arguable that
breaking the Soviet government monopoly on information transfer could
better lead to the enfeeblement and, indeed, to the ultimate
dissolution of the Soviet empire than would the production of another
dozen missiles aimed at Moscow.
But there’s the rub:
A “long enough” world view does suggest that the evil, the
oppressive, the coercive and the simply stupid will “get what they
deserve,” but what’s not immediately clear is how the rest of us
can escape being killed, enslaved, or pauperized in the process.
When the liberals and
other collectivists began to attack freedom, they possessed a
reasonably stable, healthy, functioning economy, and almost unlimited
time to proceed to hamstring and dismantle it. A policy of political
gradualism was at least conceivable. But now, we have patchwork
crazy-quilt economy held together by baling wire and spit.
The state not only
taxes us to “feed the poor” while also inducing farmers to
slaughter milk cows and drive up food prices—it then simultaneously
turns around and subsidizes research into agricultural chemicals
designed to increase yields of milk from the cows left alive. Or
witness the fact that a decline in the price of oil is considered as
potentially frightening as a comparable increase a few years ago.
When the price went
up, we were told, the economy risked collapse for for want of energy.
The price increase was called the “moral equivalent of war” and
the Feds swung into action. For the first time in American history,
the speed at which you drive your car to work in the morning became
an issue of Federal concern. Now, when the price of oil drops, again
we risk problems, this time because American oil companies and Third
World basket-case nations who sell oil may not be able to ever pay
their debts
to our grossly
over-extended banks. The suggested panacea is that government should
now re-raise the oil prices that OPEC has lowered, via a new oil tax.
Since the government is seeking to raise oil prices to about the same
extent as OPEC did, what can we call this except the “moral
equivalent of civil war—the government against its own people?”
And, classically, in
international trade, can you imagine any entity in the world except a
government going to court claiming that a vendor was selling it goods
too cheaply and demanding not only that that naughty vendor be
compelled by the court to raise its prices, but also that it be
punished for the act of lowering them in the first place? So while
the statists could afford to take a couple of hundred years to trash
our economy and our liberties – we certainly cannot count on having
an equivalent period of stability in which to reclaim them. I contend
that there exists almost a “black hole” effect in the evolution
of nationstates just as in the evolution of stars. Once freedom
contracts beyond a certain minimum extent, the state warps the fabric
of the political continuum about itself to the degree that subsequent
re-emergence of freedom becomes all but impossible. A good
illustration of this can be seen in the area of so-called “welfare”
payments. When those who sup at the public trough outnumber (and thus
outvote) those whose taxes must replenish the trough, then what
possible choice has a democracy but to perpetuate and expand the
taking from the few for the unearned benefit of the many? Go down to
the nearest “welfare” office, find just two people on the
dole... and recognize that between them they form a voting bloc that
can forever outvote you on the question of who owns your life—and
the fruits of your life’s labor.
So essentially those
who love liberty need an “edge” of some sort if we’re
ultimately going to prevail. We obviously can’t use the altruists’
“other-directedness” of “work, slave, suffer, sacrifice, so
that next generation of a billion random strangers can live in a
better world.” Recognize that, however immoral such an appeal might
be, it is nonetheless an extremely powerful one in today’s culture.
If you can convince people to work energetically for a “cause,”
caring only enough for their personal welfare so as to remain alive
enough and healthy enough to continue working—then you have a truly
massive reservoir of energy to draw from. Equally clearly, this is
just the sort of appeal which tautologically cannot be utilized for
egoistic or libertarian goals. If I were to stand up before you
tonight and say something like, “Listen, follow me as I enunciate
my noble ‘cause,’ contribute your money to support the ‘cause,’
give up your free time to work for the ‘cause,’ strive selflessly
to bring it about, and then (after you and your children are dead)
maybe your children’s children will actually live under
egoism”—you’d all think I’d gone mad. And of course you’d
be right. Because the point I’m trying to make is that
libertarianism and/or egoism will be spread if, when, and as,
individual libertarians and/or egoists find it profitable and/or
enjoyable to do so. And probably only then.
While I certainly do
not disparage the concept of political action, I don’t believe that
it is the only, nor even necessarily the most cost effective path
toward increasing freedom in our time. Consider that, for a fraction
of the investment in time, money and effort I might expend in trying
to convince the state to abolish wiretapping and all forms of
censorship—I can teach every libertarian who’s interested how to
use cryptography to abolish them unilaterally.
There is a maxim—a
proverb—generally attributed to the Eskimoes, which very likely
most Libertarians have already heard. And while you likely would not
quarrel with the saying, you might well feel that you’ve heard it
often enough already, and that it has nothing further to teach us,
and moreover, that maybe you’re even tired of hearing it. I shall
therefore repeat it now:
If you give a man a
fish, the saying runs, you feed him for a day. But if you teach a
man how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.
Your exposure to the
quote was probably in some sort of a “workfare” vs. “welfare”
context; namely, that if you genuinely wish to help someone in need,
you should teach him how to earn his sustenance, not simply how to
beg for it. And of course this is true, if only because the next time
he is hungry, there might not be anybody around willing or even able
to give him a fish, whereas with the information on how to fish, he
is completely self sufficient.
But I submit that this
exhausts only the first order content of the quote, and if there
were nothing further to glean from it, I would have wasted your time
by citing it again. After all, it seems to have almost a
crypto-altruist slant, as though to imply that we should structure
our activities so as to maximize the benefits to such hungry beggars
as we may encounter.
But consider:
Suppose this Eskimo
doesn’t know how to fish, but he does know how to hunt walruses.
You, on the other hand, have often gone hungry while traveling
through walrus country because you had no idea how to catch the damn
things, and they ate most of the fish you could catch.
And now suppose the
two of you decide to exchange information, bartering fishing
knowledge for hunting knowledge. Well, the first thing to observe is
that a transaction of this type categorically and unambiguously
refutes the Marxist premise that every trade must have a “winner”
and a “loser”–the idea that if one person gains, it must
necessarily be at the “expense” of another person who loses.
Clearly, under this
scenario, such is not the case. Each party has gained something he
did not have before, and neither has been diminished in any way.
When it comes to
exchange of information (rather than material objects) life is no
longer a zero-sum game. This is an extremely powerful notion. The
“law of diminishing returns,” the “first and second laws of
thermodynamics”—all those “laws” which constrain our
possibilities in other contexts—no longer bind us! Now that’s
anarchy!
Or consider another
possibility:
Suppose this hungry
Eskimo never learned to fish because the ruler of his nation-state
had decreed fishing illegal. Because fish contain dangerous tiny
bones, and sometimes sharp spines, he tells us, the
state has decreed that
their consumption—and even their possession—are too hazardous to
the people’s health to be permitted . . . even by knowledgeable,
willing adults. Perhaps it is because citizens’ bodies
are thought to be
government property, and therefore it is the function of the state to
punish those who improperly care for government property. Or perhaps
it is because the state generously extends to competent adults the
“benefits” it provides to children and to the mentally ill:
namely, a full-time, all-pervasive supervisory conservatorship—so
that they need not trouble themselves with making choices about
behavior thought physically risky or morally “naughty.” But, in
any case, you stare stupefied, while your Eskimo informant relates
how this law is taken so seriously that a friend of his was recently
imprisoned for years for the crime of “possession of nine ounces of
trout with intent to distribute.”
Now you may conclude
that a society so grotesquely oppressive as to enforce a law of this
type is simply an affront to the dignity of all human beings. You may
go farther and decide to commit some portion of your discretionary,
recreational time specifically to the task of thwarting this
tyrant’s goal. (Your rationale may be “altruistic” in the sense
of wanting to liberate the oppressed, or “egoistic” in the sense
of proving you can outsmart the oppressor—or very likely some
combination of these or perhaps even other motives.)
But, since you have
zero desire to become a martyr to your “cause,” you’re not
about to mount a military campaign, or even try to run a boatload of
fish through the blockade. However, it is here that technology—and
in particular information technology—can multiply your efficacy
literally a hundredfold. I say “literally,” because for a
fraction of the effort (and virtually none of the risk) attendant to
smuggling in a hundred fish, you can quite readily produce a hundred
Xerox copies of fishing instructions. If the targeted government,
like present-day America, at least permits open discussion of topics
whose implementation is restricted, then that should suffice. But,
if the government attempts to suppress the flow of information as
well, then you will have to take a little more effort and perhaps
write your fishing manual on a floppy disk encrypted according to
your mythical Eskimo’s public-key parameters.
But as far as
increasing real-world access to fish you have made genuine nonzero
headway—which may continue to snowball as others redisseminate the
information you have provided. And you have not had to waste any of
your time trying to convert ideological adversaries, or even trying
to win over the undecided. Recall Harry Browne’s dictum from
“Freedom in an Unfree World” that the success of any endeavor is
in general inversely proportional to the number of people whose
persuasion is necessary to its fulfilment.
If you look at
history, you cannot deny that it has been dramatically shaped by men
with names like Washington, Lincoln, Nixon, Marcos, Duvalier, Khadaffi
and their ilk. But it has also been shaped by people with names like
Edison, Curie, Marconi, Tesla and Wozniak. And this latter shaping
has been at least as pervasive, and not nearly so bloody.
And that’s where I’m
trying to take The LiberTech Project. Rather than beseeching the
state to please not enslave, plunder or constrain us, I propose a
libertarian network spreading the technologies by which we may seize
freedom for ourselves.
But here we must be a
bit careful. While it is not (at present) illegal to encrypt
information when government wants to spy on you, there is no
guarantee of what the future may hold. There have been bills
introduced, for example, which would have made it a crime to wear
body armor when government wants to shoot you. That is, if you were
to commit certain crimes while wearing a Kevlar vest, then that fact
would constitute a separate federal crime of its own. This law to my
knowledge has not passed, yet ... but it does indicate how government
thinks.
Other technological
applications, however, do indeed pose legal risks.
We recognize, for
example, that anyone who helped a pre-Civil War slave escape on the
“underground railroad” was making a clearly illegal use of
technology—as the sovereign government of the United States of
America at that time found the buying and selling of human beings
quite as acceptable as the buying and selling of cattle. Similarly,
during Prohibition, anyone who used his bathtub to ferment yeast and
sugar into the illegal psychoactive drug, alcohol—the controlled
substance, wine—was using technology in a way that could get him
shot dead by federal agents for his “crime”–unfortunately not
to be restored to life when Congress reversed itself and re-permitted
use of this drug.
So, to quote a former
President, un-indicted co-conspirator and pardoned felon: “Let me
make one thing perfectly clear:” The LiberTech Project does not
advocate, participate in, or conspire in the violation of any law—no
matter how oppressive, unconstitutional or simply stupid such law may
be. It does engage in description (for educational and informational
purposes only) of technological processes, and some of these
processes (like flying a plane or manufacturing a firearm) may well
require appropriate licensing to perform legally. Fortunately, no
license is needed for the distribution or receipt of information
itself.
So, the next time you
look at the political scene and despair, thinking, “Well, if 51% of
the nation and 51% of this State, and 51% of this city have to turn
Libertarian before I’ll be free, then somebody might
as well cut my goddamn
throat now, and put me out of my misery”— recognize that such is
not the case. There exist ways to make yourself free.
If you wish to explore
such techniques via the Project, you are welcome to give me your name
and address—or a fake name and mail drop, for that matter—and
you’ll go on the mailing list for my erratically published
newsletter. Any friends or acquaintances whom you think would be
interested are welcome as well. I’m not even asking for stamped
self-addressed envelopes, since my printer can handle mailing labels
and actual postage costs are down in the noise compared with the
other efforts in getting an issue out. If you should have an idea to
share, or even a useful product to plug, I’ll be glad to have you
write it up for publication. Even if you want to be the proverbial
“free rider” and just benefit from what others contribute—you’re
still welcome: Everything will be public domain; feel free to copy it
or give it away (or sell it, for that matter, ’cause if you can get
money for it while I’m taking full-page ads trying to give it away,
you’re certainly entitled to your capitalist profit...) Anyway,
every application of these principles should make the world just a
little freer, and I’m certainly willing to underwrite that, at
least for the foreseeable future.
I will leave you with
one final thought: If you don’t learn how to beat your plowshares
into swords before they outlaw swords, then you sure as HELL ought to
learn before they outlaw plowshares too.
—Chuck Hammill
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