The crime problem that I worry about most here is all of the fraud, all of the abuse, all of the harassment, all of the invasion of privacy that is allowed to go on now in the absence of good security. That is the criminal problem that is being created today by what I think is a muddle of federal policies which deny people access to technology that can help them protect their privacy.
If someone is planning a serious criminal conspiracy and is going to the trouble of using all kinds of fancy communications, the likelihood that they are going to go down to Radio Shack and buy the modem or buy the telephone that has stamped on it “approved by the NSA” is very slim. And what we are in fact trading off is the privacy rights of the vast majority of the population who are law-abiding citizens.
The notion that technology is just some sort of snake that’s slithering along, and it should go wherever it likes, wherever the brain trust is going to let that go, without a realization that there’s public policy issues here – public safety issues here – is I think a very naive approach.
There’s going to be a sub-specialty called mob cryptographer. And I don’t mean this as a joke at all … the control of cryptography I do not believe will ever lead us toward any real solution.
The Internet could literally be buried in a flurry of electronic junk mail.
Imagine … Clipper is rolled out. The mass market buys it because it’s better than nothing. Sophisticates use something else. The law enforcement guys run some sort of Net monitoring program to see who is using what type of encryption, and compare it to their database of key registrations. Then they just watch the folks who are encrypting with programs other than Clipper.
Q: What were Jerry Garcia’s last words before his heart attack? A: “Netscape opened at what?” … “This kind of phenomenon is like a great, big loopy comet that shows up only once in a while,” says futurist Paul Saffo. “The impact of Netscape is as much emotional as financial.”
People are getting used to conducting business where they don’t meet face-to-face. But people have not yet started building businesses assuming that. They will.
E-mail is a killer app for a lot of reasons.
What you can scribble on paper you should be able to scribble on the computer … What I’m envisioning is something around the size of a book, about 8 by 10 inches … with a back-lit color display … You could actually read in bed with this computer without disturbing the person next to you because the screen is lit up. It will also have communication in it, so that if I’m reading something that might interest you, I can just circle it and flick it off to your machine. The things I am talking about will be commonplace at a very low price shortly.