Here’s a transcript of Bruce Sterling’s speech at “Global Challenges, Trends and Best Practices in Cryptography,” the Information System Security and Education Center, Washington, DC, on 20 November. It’s a fascinating story about where we are on cryptography, thus computer privacy.
So: flame on. Here’s the story as I see it. The big story about crypto is a power struggle between two American tribes: geeks and spooks. Occasionally innocent people blunder into this situation, but they get lost, either because they don’t understand the technology (that’s what geeks say) or they’re not to pry any further into stuff beyond the reach of mere civilians (that’s what the spooks say).
[…] The truer and sadder story of crypto was that the spooks and the geeks both beat the hell out of our democratic process, rendering lawyers, consumers, the Congress, the industry, and the Administration totally irrelevant, and leaving crypto as a blasted technical wasteland, in a kind of Afghan-style feud, where every single party was necessarily a crook, or a scofflaw, or a deceiver, or weirdly suspect, and there was no legitimacy, and no common ground, and still, today, no good method to assemble any.
Fascinating reading — and scary, especially since he paints the geeks as adolescents who want the world to be run on their terms, and the spooks, by their nature, lack the oversight (thus the discipline) to be simply, blindly relied upon.
(Via Boing Boing)