Word: crypto
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This scenario, in which crypto-wielding cybercriminals take over the world, has become a standard plot device in turn-of-the-century science fiction. I've even used it once or twice. But there is good news on this front. Running the world turns out to be surprisingly challenging. It isn't something an evil mastermind can do just by hitting return on his keyboard...
...however, money isn't "money" just because some hacker says it is. We don't secretly print our own personal currency on pink paper at Kinko's--not because it's impossible but because nobody would want it. If Alan Greenspan were a masked Kleagle in a big white crypto hood, nobody would use dollars either...
...taken some anxious years of real-world experience for people to figure out that crypto turned loose in cyberspace will not make the world blow up. Crypto's more or less around and available now, and no, it's not an explosive munition. The threats were overblown, much like Y2K. The rhetoric of all sides has been crazily provocative...
...expects that of fringe people in Berkeley. The U.S. government, on the other hand, should have been fairer and more honest. The crypto issue, which is still smoldering and poisoning the atmosphere, could have been settled sensibly long ago. We would have found out that some small forms of crypto were useful and practical and that most of the visionary stuff was utter hogwash. It would have shaken out in a welter of disillusionment, just as Flower Power did. But we never got to that point, thanks mostly to the obstreperous attitudes of the anti-crypto forces, who are basically...
...does most of the upfront p.r. in the anti-crypto effort. The FBI doesn't like the prospect of losing some wiretaps. That's just the FBI; it would say the same thing about telepathy if it had it. The true secret mavens of crypto are at the NSA. Spy-code breakers such as Alan Turing invented electronic computers in the first place, so the NSA has a long-held hegemony here. The NSA sets the U.S. government's agenda on crypto, and it will not fairly or openly debate this subject, ever...