www.hacktivismo.com/public/tfiles/crossbows2crypto.txt
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. 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. 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 multi-megabuck CRAY X-MP can't crack in a year. Within a few years, it should be economically feasible to similarly encrypt voice communications; 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. The "public" part of the key consists of the product pq of the two large primes p and q, and one factor, call it x , of the product xy where xy = {(p-1) * (q-1) + 1}. The "private" part of the key consists of the other factor y. This integer is then raised to the power x (modulo pq) and the resulting integer is then sent as the encrypted message. The receiver decrypts by taking this integer to the (secret) power y (modulo 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 x a (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 public 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 "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 . Paid for by private subscription, of course, not taxation . 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. 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 exist...
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