Quoting Phillip Hallam-Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I never thought much of the idea at the time. In todays climate I
> suspect that E-Gold, ZeroKnowledge and Sealand might as well
> start packing up their servers before they get busted.
(it's "HavenCo" not "Sealand", just as ZKS is ZKS and not "Canada")
I agree the current climate is substantially worse, in terms of respect for
the rule of law, individual liberty, and the prospects for freedom of
speech, than it was before the WTC bombing. However, none of this was
unanticipated; this incident just accelerates our descent into a future
dystopia of universal monitoring, global statism, and individual
subjugation, but does not at all affect where we're going. We've been on
this path for at least the past 50 years, and if this attack and the
aftermath pushes us forward another 20 years in a single day, that's certainly
important, but no one should be surprised when they look around themselves
and don't like what they see.
(I assume you mean legislative/legal/political climate; while the
nay-sayers said we'd be out of business before the end of 2000 due to lack
of demand, HavenCo at least is profitable, and I think E-Gold is as well.)
This trend is far more damaging to firms whose core business is not the
provision of anonymity and privacy to clients, but which require
privacy and anonymity provided by others to make their services useful.
If it becomes more difficult to provide privacy/anonymity/security, the
demand for such services will increase even faster than the costs of
providing them. Some firms with relatively weak technical or other
basis may be unable to scale up to provide more secure solutions, but the
ensuing vacuum will encourage others to step up to the plate.
The greatest enemy of secure electronic mail, for instance, being widely
deployed is the LACK of widespread monitoring. If every internet
connection in the US were monitored actively, and the contents were
routinely used in civil and criminal legal actions, technologies
like ZKS Freedom, PGP, SSL would be in far wider use than they are now.
Certainly an argument can be made that it is more complex to offer such
services with active government prosecution in one or more jurisdictions
around the world. However, certain fundamental technical conditions
do not cease to be true simply due to terrorist action, political will,
or legislative fiat. Blowing up the WTC is unlikely to have made factoring
RSA any easier than it was on 10 September, it is unlikely to have found
a backdoor in widely deployed symmetric ciphers, and it has not affected
the laws of thermodynamics to lessen the difficulty of defeating
steganography. Sure, identifiable persons, physical assets, etc. can now
be more easily attacked through legal means, at least in most of the world,
and there is public support in many countries for international military
action against others, provided at least a tenuous link to the "global
terrorist conspiracy". However, the fundamental game is not changed.
All that is required for "cypherpunk" reality is:
[*] at least one computer with secure local execution environment
(processor, some internal secure memory for interim results)
[*] some means of permanently storing data (which can be
unreliable, monitored, etc.)
[*] some means of communication (even highly monitored, maliciously
modified, or other) to the humans involved
[*] plus, for anything reasonable, multiple such setups and some means
of communication among them in a large network, even monitored or
modified, with traffic analysis possibly limited to "a member of the
overall network" where "network" can be massively more broad than
"conspirators").
[*] Code[1].
I think it highly unlikely even a new "War on Terrorism", even if 100 times
more forceful than the "War on Drugs", will be able to eliminate every
last pre-2001 laptop computer, PDA, etc. from the earth, or the ability
for people to send email (even if monitored, and outright encrypted email
is a capital crime) and connect to a global network.
On top of that infrastructure, viable electronic cash systems protected
from traffic analysis and resistant to censorship, anonymous publication
systems, etc. can be built. Indeed, most of the technical challenges have
been solved since the 1980s; the only difficulty has been general lack of
demand from the public, standard software engineering complexity issues,
excessive concern for legality and intellectual property concerns,
and the distraction of the dotcom boom. If, as you seem to imply,
open warfare on personal liberty shall be declared, most of those concerns
go away; if it's a felony to deploy ecash, you'll want to be anonymous
anyway, and then violating someone's patent just doesn't seem like a big
deal in comparison.
> [...]
> Sealand will probably still keep maintaining its idiotic claim to be an
> independent state, but if the UK government wants to search they can
> easily get a warrant. If sealand were outside UK territorial waters (it
> ain't anymore) the navy can board at any time of their choice any structure
> or vessel that is not registered with the shipping registry of a recognised
> state that is in international waters.
Sealand's claim to statehood rests on the following argument:
1) An artificial island, Roughs Tower, was constructed in 1942 by the
British Government in then international waters, for the purpose of
defense. This island was not constructed for the purposes of extending
the UK's territory, but only to defend the UK's mainland from air or
sea attack.
2) Subsequent to cessation of hostilities, WWII, 1945, the UK removed
personnel and some equipment from the island, abandoning it. The UK did
not return to the island at any subsequent point.
3) In 1966, Roy Bates, a UK citizen, along with others, landed on Sealand
and occupied it. It was at this point abandoned for over 20 years by
the UK government. Roy, his wife Joan, and son Michael established
permanent primary residence on the island, renaming it Sealand.
4) Through repeated legal challenges, including firing on ships of the royal
navy, mounting armed counter-invasion, resolving the issue of taxation of
UK citizens resident on Sealand as if they were resident in any other
foreign country, etc., Sealand's sovereignty has been repeatedly reaffirmed.
We have a large body of supporting documentation from the past 59 years;
I'll try to put more of it up on our website in the future.
5) Despite the UK extending territorial waters in 1987 to 12nm, Sealand
was by that point established for more than 20 years, and extended its
own territorial waters to 18nm the day before. Similarly, treaties and
amendments to the laws of the sea in the 1980s prohibiting the construction
of platforms in international waters by sovereign governments in order to
extend territorial waters did not apply to the UK in 1942, nor did they
apply to Sealand when founded in 1966. Such treaties also support the
long legal tradition of artificial and reclaimed land being treated as
land for the purposes of international and national law.
None of this has been in the least affected by an apparent new willingness
on the part of the US and other nations to invade arbitrary other nations.
Sealand has nothing to do with any of the recent terrorist events; if Osama
bin Ladin were, for instance, living on Sealand, I would fully expect
Sealand would be asked to turn him over[1] or face invasion. Sealand's
legal status is NOT the issue; international realpolitik of larger states
vs. smaller ones is much more the issue. In fact, given such a situation,
it seems more likely they would treat Sealand as a state, and ask us to
comply with a demand placed in such language.
Independently of that, HavenCo operates. If HavenCo/Sealand is shut down by
invasion by the nation of -------, HavenCo can continue to operate
from other locations; indeed, eliminating Sealand would simply establish more
need for our services and ensure our next facility has more customers and
capital equipment than Sealand.
[1] There *was* a time where cypherpunks wrote code, rather than worrying
about influencing legislation; they assumed the government was
malicious and all powerful anddesigned technical systems to defeat them
still; I don't think that time is over. Indeed, an upcoming conference,
CodeCon, exists to advance the state of the art in and promote discussion
of such systems; CFP to be sent shortly.)
[2] Which would be done, but in multiple boxes/bags/jars, just as our
ultimate response to someone presenting a clear military threat unless we
hand over a given customer machine is to destroy it completely and then
refund the customer's unused balance.
--
Ryan Lackey [RL7618 RL5931-RIPE] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CTO and Co-founder, HavenCo Ltd. +44 7970 633 277
the free world just milliseconds away http://www.havenco.com/
OpenPGP 4096: B8B8 3D95 F940 9760 C64B DE90 07AD BE07 D2E0 301F
