and pity and not getting it. In parts of the Third World people are
routinely disappeared, not because of high-tech computer
surveillance but for the most trivial and insane reasons -- because
they wear glasses, because they were seen reading a book -- and if
they survive, it's because of the thin thread of surveillance carried
out by Amnesty International.
There may be securicams running 24 hours a day all around us,
but mechanical surveillance is not the same as people actually
getting attention or care. Sure, rich people, like most of us here, are
gonna get plenty of attention, probably too much, a poisonous
amount, but in the meantime life has become so cheap in this society
that we let people stagger around right in front of us exhaling
tuberculosis without treatment. It's not so much information haves
and have-nots and watch and watch-nots.
I wish I could speak at greater length more directly to the
topic of this panel. But since I'm the last guy to officially speak at
CFP IV, I want the seize the chance to grandstand and do a kind of
pontifical summation of the event. And get some irrepressible
feelings off my chest.
What am I going to remember from CFP IV? I'm going to
remember the Chief Counsel of NSA and his impassioned insistence
that key escrow cryptography represents normality and the status
quo, and that unlicensed hard cryptography is a rash and radical leap
into unplumbed depths of lawlessness. He made a literary reference
to BRAVE NEW WORLD. What he said in so many words was, "We're
not the Brave New World, Clipper's opponents are the Brave New
World."
And I believe he meant that. As a professional science fiction
writer I remember being immediately struck by the deep conviction
that there was plenty of Brave New World to go around.
I've been to all four CFPs, and in my opinion this is the darkest
one by far. I hear ancestral voices prophesying war. All previous
CFPs had a weird kind of camaraderie about them. People from the
most disparate groups found something useful to tell each other.
But now that America's premiere spookocracy has arrived on stage
and spoken up, I think the CFP community has finally found a group of
outsiders that it cannot metabolize. The trenchworks are going up
and I see nothing but confrontation ahead.
Senator Leahy at least had the elementary good sense to
backpedal and temporize, as any politician would when he saw the
white-hot volcano of technological advance in the direct path of a
Cold War glacier that has previously crushed everything in its way.
But that unlucky flak-catcher the White House sent down here
