[From the EFF-Austin online newsletter, _WORD_, Issue #9]
KEYNOTE ADDRESS : CRYPTOGRAPHY CONFERENCE
by Bruce Sterling
Hello everybody. It's quite an honor to be delivering the
keynote address -- a *thankfully brief* keynote address -- at this
conference. I hope to clear the decks in short order, and let you
spend an engrossing afternoon, listening to an intense discussion of
complex and important public issues, by highly qualified people, who
fully understand what they're talking about. Unlike myself.
Before all this begins, though, I do want to establish a
context for this conference. Let me briefly put on my professional
dunce-hat, as a popular-science writer, and try to make it clear to
you exactly what the heck is going on here today.
Cryptography. The science and study of secret writing, especially
codes and cypher systems. The procedures, processes, measures and
algorithms for making and using secret exchanges of information.
*Secret* exchanges, done, made and conducted without the knowledge of
others, whether those others be governments, competitors, local, state
or federal police, private investigators, wiretappers, cellular
scanners, corporate security people, marketers, merchandisers,
journalists, public health officials, squads for public decency,
snoopy neighbors, or even your own spouse, your own parents, or your
own children.
Cryptography is a way to confine knowledge to the initiated and
the privileged in your circle, whatever that circle might be:
corporate co-workers, fellow bureaucrats, fellow citizens, fellow
modem-users, fellow artists, fellow writers, fellow
influence-peddlers, fellow criminals, fellow software pirates, fellow
child pornographers.
Cryptography is a way to assure the privacy of digital way to
help control the ways in which you reveal yourself to the world. It
is also a way to turn everything inside a computer, even a computer
seized or stolen by experts, into an utterly scrambled Sanskrit that
no one but the holder of the key can read. It is a swift, powerful,
portable method of high-level computer security. Electronic
cryptography is potentially, perhaps, even a new form of information
economics.
Cryptography is a very hot issue in electronic civil liberties
circles at the moment. After years of the deepest, darkest,
never-say-anything, military spook obscurity, cryptography is out of
the closet and openly flaunting itself in the street. Cryptography is
attracting serious press coverage. The federal administration has
