The phone companies that survive will become cellular phone companies. “Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime” is a good motto for a 21st century phone company. There will be flat rates for so-called “long-distance.” Any nation or PTT which tries to cling to current long-distance telephony billing practices will see their economy destroyed by others with more enlightened policies.
People won’t use these networks if they don’t trust them. Internet is run by an increasingly large group of organizations, and nobody is responsible for security. That means users have to be able to protect themselves, and encryption is the solution. [Unless privacy and access issues are solved with an acceptable public policy, similar to the rules that govern the telephone system today,] you create fundamental problems for democracy.
The use of e-mail raises interesting privacy issues. In the case of e-mail, privacy issues arise when people lose control over the dissemination of their mail messages. When should managers be allowed to read the e-mail of their subordinates? One can readily conjure instances where managers would seek access to e-mail files.
If more and more Internet users erect one-way barriers, “the services you can use are more limited.”
If the prospects of democracy on the Internet are viewed in terms of encryption, then the security of the existing national government becomes the limit of the matter: what is secure for the nation-state is taken to mean true security for everyone, a highly dubious proposition. The question of potentials for new forms of social space that might empower individuals in new ways are foreclosed in favor of preserving existing relations of force as they are viewed by the most powerful institution in the history of the world: the government of the United States.
Need tickets to a Broadway show? Your computer will handle the transaction. Just give it a price range, seating preference and a credit card. Computers will even make it easier for you to link to a doctor in another city or connect people around the world in virtual classrooms. “Those kind of technologies will become ubiquitous with more processing power.”
Americans have two dichotomous views held exactly at the same time. One view is, “None of your damn business, a man’s home is his castle. What I do is my business.” And the other is, “What have you got to hide? If you didn’t have anything to hide, you wouldn’t be using cryptography.” There’s a deep suspicion of people who want to keep things secret … [Cryptoanarchy] will be done technologically. It’s already happening.
The ultimate Crypto Anarchy tool would be anonymous digital money … Ultimately, the lessons taught by the Cypherpunks, as well as the tools they produce, are designed to help shape a world where cryptography runs free – a Pac-Man-like societal maneuver in which the digital technology that previously snatched our privacy is used, via cryptography, to snatch it back.
The magic of public-key crypto can be extended far beyond the exchange of messages with secrecy. Ultimately, its value will be to provide anonymity, the right most threatened by a fully digitized society.
Cypherpunks will make the networks safe for privacy.