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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:05
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
Mon, 25 Jan 1999 09:43:42 -0500
At 12:18 AM -0500 on 1/25/99, Anonymous wrote:
> <expletive deleted> You have to assume someone in the room is a spook.
So? Spooks are irrelevant, oddly enough. You obey the law. Strictly. Demand
legal proof of citizenship. Have photo-id badges. If people don't like the
law they can run for Congress, or bribe their Congressman better, or
something. Just like in any public situation, you don't disclose any
material non-public information, in the investment, or the natsec, sense.
Even without those, information about cryptography is still valuable,
right? Digital Commerce is Financial Cryptography and all that...
> There is a diode between you and Boris.
Thank you for your output. :-).
> The men in suits have guns. And will use them if you don't play
> by their linguistics.
Right. And there's a commie under every bush, our present presidential
administration not withstanding, :-). That just sounds like the same old
political song and dance, to me. I expect that, in the same way that devine
intervention was discovered to be, um, immaterial, to discussions of
physics, if we took off our aluminum hats on cryptography, the government
death-rays couldn't kill us, either.
So, even if "they" have guns, who cares? Besides, I have a suit, too. :-).
The guys with guns, like everyone else with a belly, are, ultimately, for
sale. Bribe them with better and cheaper stuff, or, better, make better and
cheaper stuff than they can ever make, just like Americans did to other,
eurasian, statists.
Anyway, I'm getting real tired of the whole geeks-vs-spooks, geeks-vs-cops
political crypto-regulatory thing. It's becoming a waste of time and
energy. I think that the emperor of the "political layer" has no clothes,
and I mean that for people on both sides of the issue. You simply cannot
legislate away a technology which greatly improves economic efficiency, and
strong financial cryptography on a geodesic public internet is now,
demonstrably, just as important in that regard as railroads, or
automobiles, or electricity were.
So, again, in the spirit of complying with the strict letter of the law, in
the same way that late midieval peasants went to confession for the sin
against God of shooting an armored knight :-), what can you do in that room
as a group of American citizens, what can you talk about, demonstrate, and,
frankly, sell, that you can't do if foreign national is there?
I bet there's a lot, and that it might be valuable for American financial
cryptographic engineers to be there, even for emotional/social support :-).
So, again, I'd like a few general ideas, from some of the more regulatorily
astute folks out there.
Cheers,
Robert Hettinga
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:05