from crossbows to cryptography begin pgp signed message please note that the following speech was made by chuck hammill in address all letters to his address given at the end of this document russell from crossbows to cryptography thwarting the state via technology given at the future of freedom conference november you know technology and particularly computer technology has often gotten a bad rap in libertarian cir cles we tend to think of orwell s or terry gilliam s brazil or the proximity detectors keeping east berlin s slave citizens on their own side of the border or the so phisticated 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 thru a magnetometer run by a government policeman and permit him to paw thru our be longings 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 promis ing 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 can not 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 de scribe 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 the arrow itself and be reasonably assured of hitting his tar get 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 respec tively 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 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 advertise ments 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 equiv alent 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 ex change 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 com puter 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 communi cations 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 in formation transfer i d like to take just a moment to sketch the mathemat ics 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 ex tremely in the sense that if primes p and q have digits apiece then their digit product cannot in gen eral be factored in less than years by the most powerful computer now in existence the public part of the key consists of the prod uct pq of the two large primes p and q and one fac tor call it x of the product xy where xy p q 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 b c z representation 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 ex change 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 dig ital 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 ori ginal 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 to day 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 com puters as commonplace as sliderules used to be more so in fact because there are things computers can do which will interest and instruct and year olds and it is pre cisely 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 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 ac cessible xerox machines are unknown the relatively few copying machines in existence are controlled more inten sively 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 blackbird and air drop them over moscow in the middle of the night paid for by private sub scription 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 af ter 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 govern ment 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 at tack 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 sub sidizes research into agricultural chemicals designed to in crease 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 be came an issue of federal concern now when the price of oil drops again we risk problems this time because ameri can 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 imag ine 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 nation states just as in the evolution of stars once free dom 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 tak ing 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 obvi ously 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 ap peal 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 actu ally 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 poli tical 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 try ing to convince the state to abolish wiretapping and all forms of censorship i can teach every libertarian who s in terested 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 al ready 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 ac tivities 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 thru 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 some thing he did not have before and neither has been dimin ished 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 possi bilities 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 govern ment property or perhaps it is because the state gener ously 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 re lates how this law is taken so seriously that a friend of his was recently imprisoned for years for the crime of pos session 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 far ther and decide to commit some portion of your discretion ary 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 per haps 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 in formation 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 tar geted government like present day america at least permits open discussion of topics whose implementation is re stricted 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 re disseminate the information you have provided and you have not had to waste any of your time trying to convert id eological adversaries or even trying to win over the unde cided 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 persua sion 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 per vasive 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 en slave plunder or constrain us i propose a libertarian net work 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 fu ture may hold there have been bills introduced for exam ple 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 simi larly during prohibition anyone who used his bathtub to ferment yeast and sugar into the illegal psychoactive drug alcohol the controlled substance wine was using technol ogy 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 educa tional and informational purposes only of technological processes and some of these processes like flying a plane or manufacturing a firearm may well require appropriate li censing to perform legally fortunately no license is needed for the distribution or receipt of information it self so the next time you look at the political scene and despair thinking well if of the nation and of this state and 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 your self 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 la bels 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 forseeable fu ture 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 the libertech project queensbury drive los angeles california hammill netcom com the above libertech address was updated december with the permission of chuck hammill by russell whitaker those interested in the issues raised in this piece should participate in at least these newsgroups alt privacy alt security pgp comp org eff talk sci crypt a copy of the rsa based public key encryption program pgp pretty good privacy can be obtained at various ftp sites around the world one such site is gate demon co uk where an ms dos version can be had by anonymous ftp as pgp zip in pub pgp versions for other operating systems including unix variants and macintosh are also available source code is also available here s the blurb for pgp by the way quote pgp pretty good privacy ver rsa public key encryption freeware for msdos protects e mail lets you communicate securely with people you ve never met with no secure channels needed for prior exchange of keys well featured and fast excellent user documentation pgp has sophisticated key management an rsa conventional hybrid encryption scheme message digests for digital signatures data compression before encryption and good ergonomic design source code is free filenames pgp zip executable and manuals pgp src zip sources keywords pgp pretty good privacy rsa public key encryption privacy authentication signatures email end quote russell earl whitaker whitaker eternity demon co uk communications editor amix rwhitaker extropy the journal of transhumanist thought board member extropy institute exi
