Since I’ve been interested in the history and political significance of cryptography (I discussed the connection between computers and the 2nd amendment here) I read the book This Machine Kills Secrets by journalist Andy Greenberg, a fascinating, if somewhat brief and barely technical history of underground cryptography in the internet age. Among other things I learned there is that, whereas I had thought of gun culture and computer culture as analogous but non-intersecting, in fact there was considerable overlap:
One adjunct group, called the Cypherpunks Shooting Club, even organized trips to rifle ranges to teach each other to shoot .22s and semiautomatic weapons, the final resort should the government ever come after their electronic and physical freedoms. (Tim May, an avid gun enthusiast himself, didn’t attend. “I Don’t give free lessons, especially not to clueless software people,” he says.)
Jim Bell, a cypherpunk insider, proposed in the mid-1990s “Assassination Politics”, basically a scheme for combining strong cryptography with a sort of stock market for murder contracts. The goal was anarchy:
If only one person in a thousand was willing to pay $1 to see some government slimeball dead, that would be, in effect, a $250,000 bounty on his head[…] Chances are good that nobody above the level of county commissioner would even risk staying in office.
Just how would this change politics in America? It would take far less time to answer, “What would remain the same?” No longer would we be electing people who will turn around and tax us to death, regulate us to death, or for that matter send hired thugs to kill us when we oppose their wishes.
This all sounds like the sorts of rant you hear these days from the extreme gun nuts. So maybe the analogy is not that far-fetched.
And, come to think of it, now that concrete schemes are afoot to turn weapons manufacture into a software problem with 3d printing, even the technical differences between guns and codes are dissipating.
Common Infirmities 