Articles
In Pursuit of Liberty, by
Jarret Wollstein, May 1997
Primer on liberty concepts, including voluntary vs. coercive associations, individual rights, government and possible future improvements in the status quo
The growing authoritarianism of governments in the West, will eventually lead to their collapse ... Because of the rapid growth of privacy-enhancing technology, this collapse will probably come sooner rather than later. As James Dale Davidson and ... Rees-Mogg explain ... "The process by which the nation-state grew over the past five centuries will be put into reverse by the new logic of the Information Age." That process includes: The spread of inexpensive, encryption technology, making possible, in theory, an unprecedented level of personal and financial privacy ...
The Internet and the End of Monetary Sovereignty, by Bill Frezza,
The Future of Money in the Information Age, 1997
Considers how cyberspace promises of privacy and anonymity may lead to new monetary institutions and "a practical realization of laissez-faire capitalism" as advocated by Ayn Rand
[P]rivacy in cyberspace will not be an abstract political right ... In the future, electronic privacy will be an absolute algorithmic certainty. The science of cryptology, long an exclusive province of government security agencies, has taken root in the private sector ... The day will inevitably come when the amount of effort required to breach the shield of privacy provided by low-cost, widely available encryption will exceed the value of such an attack by so many orders of magnitude that it will not be economically feasible to base public policy on such invasions.
Treating Surveillance as Damage and Routing Around It, by
Kevin Carson, 11 Aug 2013
Discusses how, as in the wake of the Snowden disclosures, distributed networks respond to attempts at state control, citing PGP adoption and the Firefox TOR browser bundle malware
Networks, as the saying goes, treat censorship as damage and route around it. And the same is true of surveillance. This is brilliantly illustrated by the public response to the Edward Snowden story. In the period after Snowden exposed the NSA’s domestic surveillance of American email, the daily adoption rate for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) email encryption tripled. ... Australian Crypto Party founder Asher Wolf noted, "those who want to break the law have already probably learnt cryptography." That's true not only of ordinary criminals and terrorists, but of dissidents, activists and whistleblowers of all kinds.
Why Do You Need PGP?, by
Phil Zimmermann,
The Ethical Spectacle, Jul 1995
Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house?
Interviews
John Gilmore on inflight activism, spam and sarongs, by
John Gilmore, Mikael Pawlo,
GrepLaw, 18 Aug 2004
Topics discussed include: terrorism, the drug war, encryption, censorship, spam, the end-to-end principle, the right to travel, anonymity, secret FAA/TSA rules, blogs, copy protection, free software and the EFF
# ... What is your take on the balance between censorship, encryption and national security?
There is no balance needed among censorship, encryption, and national security. Censorship is a counterproductive social policy and weakens the national security, by suppressing the flow of useful information among the honest citizenry. Widespread use of encryption also enhances the national security, by making private information more truly private, and by making systems and networks harder for dishonest people to penetrate.
