Here's a transcript of Bruce Sterling's address to the Global Challenges, Trends and Best Practices in Cryptography conference in DC. Bruce gives us a long, cranky and provocative State-of-the-Union for crypto, IP, and military intelligence.
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.
…I'm just declaring that rule by spooks does not work
because of civics. Spooks have no checks and balances.
You don't get to sue them. They're never held
accountable. They're not elected. They don't worry about
return on investment and they don't answer to the
stockholders. They don't even have to bury their own
mistakes; they usually get the diplomats to do that for
them. Do you think they're any smarter now than they were
during Iran Contra? Or any less reckless?
(via the Interesting People List)
