Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
widespread availability of various technologies (such as public-key cryp-
tography), it now appears that certain anarchist ideals may be possible, if
not inevitable.”
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The idea that mere regulation could prevent the spread
of such powerful technologies seemed positively quaint, a point the com-
munity drove home through a series of highly publicized and spectacular
pranks.
Strong Cryptography Wants to Be Free
Throughout the crypto debate, cryptolibertarians engineered practical
demonstrations that regulation could not, so to speak, stuff the crypto-
graphic genie back into the bottle. One particular software package, PGP
(for
Pretty Good Privacy
), became the movement's
cause célèbre
, and its
author, Phil Zimmerman, its first martyr, after becoming in 1993 the target
of a three-year criminal investigation over possible breach of export laws.
Freely downloadable from the Internet and relatively easy to install, PGP
brought military strength public-key cryptography to personal computers.
Using PGP, individuals could set up public key pairs and exchange encrypted
files over email. To underline the incoherence of export laws, which pro-
hibited the distribution of the program on electronic media but not in
topic form, Zimmerman and the MIT Press published the source code of
PGP in topic form, in a format designed to aid the scanning and optical
character recognition of the entire topic.
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Taking the idea of embedding programming code into a material artifact
one step further, another prank coded the RSA algorithm in a mere three
lines of the Perl programming language (figure 3.3). Printed on a T-shirt
(figure 3.4), affixed to emails as a signature, or even tattooed on a forearm
(figure 3.5), the lines of code instantly transformed the messenger into an
international arms trafficker, demonstrating the irrelevance of antiquated
export laws to the reality of modern information flows.
Figure 3.3
The RSA algorithm in three lines of Perl. Figure by the author.
