Molon Labe!

by Boston T. Party

  Heads nod as soft applause fills the room. The election had gone precisely to plan, and everyone has a happy glow of satisfaction about them.

  Preston continues. "Now, let's discuss what we need in January's general session. First, our proposed constitutional amendment. Second, . . . "

  2007

  The masses have always been as if one person, and this has further intensified since the advent of mass media (and our inevitable control). Our data proves that the homogeneity of Americans approximately doubled from the years 1950-2000. Accordingly, we can now quantify within 95.44% certainty (i.e., 2 standard deviations from the mean comprised by Bell Curve distribution) the range of typical American activity. Undesirable activities outside that 2 sigma can safely be (from a political standpoint) targeted for gradual regulatory restriction and, ultimately, prohibition.

  Activities outside of 3 sigma (which is 99.72% of Bell Curve distribution) are considered (by their very rarity) extremist in nature, and can be immediately targeted for prohibition (regardless of whether they are innocuous or patently undesirable).

  The point is this: extremist behavior in any guise is not long to be tolerated. The public must be constantly shown that their safety lies only within 2 sigma of the sociological mean. Stray too far from the collective norm whether you collect cars, guns, or wives and society will suddenly disown you.

  Evidence has shown that anything participated in by less than 5% of the population has very little political support, and such participated in by less than 0.3% has none at all. Without a significant sociological base, any undesirable activity or belief can easily be eradicated by legislative decree. Britain's leaders understood this perfectly as they have succeeded in disarming the marginal gun-owning population, who by 2000 constituted only 4% of households, thus outside 2 sigma of the sociological mean.

  If, for example, rockclimbing were outlawed, less than 1% of the people would be affected and the remaining 99+% would have little knowledge of the prohibition. Even if they were aware of the prohibition, that 99+% would not understand or empathize with the rockclimbers. They could not even sympathize conceptually as fellow oppressed, since the masses have little or no conscious feeling of being oppressed.

  To prove the matter from another direction, if the viewing of professional sports or the drinking of cheap beer were severely restricted by regulation, there would be a revolution the next morning. We ride a rough, simple beast, and we must take care not to interfere with its coarse (and largely harmless) prerogatives. Yet we must also continuously herd the beast within its allowed pasture, all the while shrinking the boundaries inch by inch, day by day.

  How far can it be shrunk? To zero. As the Nazi concentration camp technicians scientifically proved, the human spirit can be squeezed right out of its fleshy host. Whether or not this is desirable is a political question, but the science of doing so is well understood and completely reproducible.

  — Julius N. Harquist, The Gaian Convergence, p.146

  River Lethe Press (2007)

  A voice murmured, "Let's run away." But other voices answered, "Where to? Wait and see! There will always be time later." Nobody wanted to revolt. You don't revolt against the unknown.

  — from Treblinka (1967), by Jean-Franτois Steiner, p. 22

  Wyoming

  January 2007

  The new county government officers are sworn in, and life pretty much goes on as usual. It soon becomes apparent that the new folks in office possess an unusually high degree of competence and integrity. They seem likely to do their jobs well, so their odd rise to power is quickly forgotten.

  Cheyenne Sentinel

  February 2007

  In its biennial general session the 59th Legislature today proposed that Article 20, Section 1 of the Wyoming Constitution be amended with the following language (new text in bold):

  Any amendment or amendments to this constitution may be proposed in either branch of the legislature..., and it shall be the duty of the legislature to submit such amendment or amendments to the electors of the state at the next general election, or at the next special election convened by the governor, which shall in any event take place within one hundred and eighty (180) days of passage by both houses.

  The speaker of the house explained, 'This proposed amendment will allow our constitution to be improved by the voters more quickly in case of extraordinary events or unforeseen pressures." The governor hailed the proposal as, "A necessary amendment to keep government responsive to the people during these dynamic times."

  Voters are expected to ratify the proposed amendment in the next general election in November 2008.

  Washington, D.C.

  J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building

  March 2007

  The FBI Headquarters was completed in 1975 just before Hoover's death. A massive tetrahedron concrete bunker, its 2.5 million square feet filled the entire block from 9th to 10th Streets and north to E Street.

  Because of Pennsylvania Avenue height restrictions (so as not to block the Capitol) it was only seven stories on that side, but four stories higher at the rear northern face. Visually, it looked like gargantuan toaster with two slices of bread sticking out. It was, by all accounts, a brutal and hideous edifice posing as an impregnable fortress, dispensing with any Art Deco touches enjoyed by the Department of Justice Building across the Avenue. Rows of trees did no more to soften the FBIHQ's image than a dress on Janet Reno.

  The interior was no less unattractive. A drab rabbit warren of white corridors and anonymous doors, teeming with almost 8,000 employees. Agents generally loathed the building.

  The public knew only of the large E Street entrance near Ford's theater, used by the tri-hourly tour groups. After tramping through the building past the third-floor glass-walled Crime Lab (the "Fish Bowl") and Firearms Exhibit (featuring over 5,000 guns), the tour highlight was an MP5 submachine gun demo straight out of the movie Brazil.

  Your FBI At Work that sort of thing.

  The public was never shown anything really sensitive, such as the Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC). SIOC is the FBIHQ's command post on the 5th floor, a large windowless room full of computer terminals. Agents called it "the submarine." When any large or multiple ops were running, SIOC was a very busy place. Headed up by a Criminal Investigations Division (CID) unit chief, the post was one of the most dreaded in the FBI. Lots of responsibility, but little real authority.

  Special Agents and expected visitors used the Penn Avenue entrance on the opposite side of the building. To prevent drive-through attacks, the entrance was guarded by three sturdy reinforced-concrete planters. Just inside is a comfortable reception lobby with couches, coffee tables, and stuffed chairs. Facing the entrance behind the sign in desk is a large one way mirror. Hanging on the wall are three portraits: Hoover, the President, and the AG. Only Hoover's portrait is screwed into the wall; the other two are hung by wire. Hoover is eternal; politicians come and go. In the left wall are two elevators. The right wall is plate glass looking onto a small brick courtyard with park benches and a fountain. It was apparently just for show, as nobody had ever been seen using it.

  Special Agent Douglas Bleth walks west on Penn past the red-roofed newsstand and enters the building. He is to brief the Director at 9AM, who had been phoned by the Wyoming Secretary of State to look into the odd and possibly alarming sudden influx of new residents. A plainclothes guard at the desk checks his badge and plastic smart card ID as Bleth signs in. The guard nods and presses a hidden button under the desk. One of the elevator doors swishes open. Again, just like Brazil.

  Bleth steps inside and presses "7." The FBI top brass "sultans of the 7th floor" commanded sweeping views of Penn Avenue. But of course.

  After a brief wait, Bleth is shown into the Director's office.

  "So, who's behind all this?" asks the Director without preamble. Such pleasantries as "Good morning" were usually a waste of his time.

  Bleth says, "We have yet to learn the pers
onalities of their C3I."

  C3I stands for Command, Control, Communication, Intelligence. "Analysis of new residents' email traffic shows that their instructions likely came from encrypted messages forwarded in bulk by foreign emailers. 'Remailers' they're called."

  The Director parries, "If these Wyoming people are receiving encrypted foreign email, then how do you know this isn't a foreign operation?"

  Bleth has already considered this. "Technically, we don't, but what would any foreign country have to gain by any of this? It seems like a domestic operation, probably from the right-wing element given the conservative nature of Wyoming."

  "Good point," the Director says, nods—satisfied. "What are these nine thousand people up to?"

  "We think that they are part of, or somehow connected to, the Free State Project. You know, that group which "

  The Director harumphs. "Yes, I've heard of them. Just another libertarian pipe dream, like colonizing space on personal rocket ships. It's a last gasp effort of people who just can't get along in society. Desperate kooks."

  "I agree, sir, it is farfetched, but the FSP makes no secret of desiring to take over a state through the electoral process, even though their membership officially chose New Hampshire back in 2003. The new residents of Wyoming already have five counties. That's nearly a fourth of the state. And it's all been legal as far as we can tell."

  "Right as far as we can tell," says the Director. He is silent for a moment and then asks, "How are these people in communication?"

  "Through PGP encryption, but with a twist. Let's say that you want to send a group message to a thousand people, but encrypted. Not only is the message identical, the encryption is identical, or else you would have to encrypt it a thousand different ways — one way for each recipient according to their unique public key half. For large group comm, this is far too cumbersome. So, public key encryption is not the answer unless everyone had the se cret key, allowing the sender to encrypt the message with the public key. Although this could be done, it's needless extra work."

  "Why is that?" asks the Director.

  "Because of the way PGP operates, secret keys are not added to third party keyrings — only public keys are. Secret keys are added to the secret key ring only during a key pair's generation by the creator. I don't think PGP will allow an outside secret key to be added to the ring, and even if it can be done I'd bet it's really tricky. Too tricky for most users. The other way to do it would be to send out a file secring.pgp containing this group secret key and have the users substitute it for their own PGP secret keyring file when decrypting group email. Either way, it's a lot of extra work."

  "And the 'needless' part?"

  "PGP users who want to encrypt something solely for themselves don't have to use the RSA public key algorithm since they're not sending it to anybody else. As the sender and the recipients are all of the same group, it's like they're the same person for the purposes of this encrypted message. Therefore, single key, or symmetric, encryption is what you'd use. Meaning, the passphrase both encrypts and decrypts the message.

  "As far as the algorithms go, asymmetric encryption is no stronger than symmetric. All asymmetric encryption does is allow two people to exchange encrypted messages without having first shared a passphrase. If a secure channel exists for communicating a common passphrase, then there is no problem using symmetric encryption. The key bit lengths are not equal, however. A 128-bit symmetric IDEA key is about the same as a 1024-bit asym metric RSA key."

  The Director looks lost. "What exactly are 'bits'?" The Director, a for mer federal judge, is notoriously ignorant of technical matters. Science, mathematics, computers all of it is beyond him.

  Bleth groans inwardly. "A binary digit, b- , -it. Computers are just a collection of switches and can only read ON/OFF, 1 or 0. Humans use a base 10 numeric system, and computers use base 2. Although any of our numbers can be translated in base 2-bits, it takes many more bits to do so."

  Bleth pauses to see if the Director is following him.

  "I understand. Go on."

  "Given equal encryption strength, an asymmetric key is longer than a symmetric key because asymmetric algorithms are not as efficient."

  "I'm with you. Continue."

  "So, for these thousand people to individually decrypt your email, they must all know the common passphrase, right? But here's the problem, how do you secretly tell all of them in advance what the passphrase is? You need a secure prior channel to them. What the NSA believes is that each of the Wyoming people were, before they moved, initially contacted through their own key pair and told of the group passphrases to be used in the future. While it would be sweaty work, you'd only have to do it once. After everyone was on board with the passphrases, encrypted group emailings would be easy."

  The Director is looking off into space, thinking. "Any success decrypting those emails?"

  "None, sir. The NSA is working on them now."

  "But hasn't the RSA algorithm been broken before?"

  "Yes and no."

  "What do you mean?"

  "RSA is considered a very strong algorithm; it has no glaring weaknesses. Same for IDEA, Blowfish, Twofish, MARS, RIJNDAEL, and many others. A cryptological attack on such is actually an attack on the key itself, and a short key will compromise an impregnable algorithm. In symmetric encryption the key length decides the number of possible permutations, or "keyspace.' However, in asymmetric encryption like RSA, key length determines the size of the product of two huge parent prime numbers. The two encryptions are attacked differently. Symmetric by dictionary brute force, and asymmetric by factoring.

  "The alleged cracking of RSA was merely a successful factoring attack on a 425-bit key, which is about like a 50-bit DES symmetric key. 'Fisher Price encryption,' one analyst called it. Nobody serious about their privacy uses anything less than a 1024-bit RSA key, if not 4096 or more. Nevertheless, it took six months and 1,600 PCs to break that 425-bit key in a distributed Internet attack. The combined effort equaled about 5,000 computer years, or what the techs call MIPS."

  "Goodness. What if the key is longer?"

  "If a key is at least 128-bit symmetric, or 1024-bit asymmetric, it is considered unbreakable by brute force."

  "Come on! 'Unbreakable?' The NSA has 26 acres of computers!"

  "Yes, sir, unbreakable. And the NSA could have 26 million acres of computers. A 128-bit IDEA key has 2128 permutations, which is 3.4 times 10 to the 38th power. That's an ungodly number; the keyspace is astronomical. Every bit is like a fork in the road, and every single one of them must be guessed correctly. The trouble is, you have to make up to 3.4×1038 guesses before you're told if you guessed them correctly. It's like a giant labyrinth, except that you're never told which turns were wrong. Every attempt is a failure but one, and there are no shortcuts. All the computers on the planet working in tandem couldn't crack it in a million years."

  "Really? That sounds like wild hyperbole, Bleth."

  Patiently, Bleth explains, "The Japanese have an array of computers in Osaka used to track and simulate global environmental conditions. The array is huge; the size of four tennis courts. Their Earth Simulator is capable of 35 trillion instructions per second, and is as powerful as the twelve next fastest computers combined. It could have cracked that 50-bit DES key in a max time of just 75 minutes. A 60-bit key would need 53 days. A 70-bit key about 64,000 years. A 128-bit key would take them up to 2×1019 years to crack. That's 2 followed by 19 zeroes, which is a billion times longer than the age of the universe."

  The magnitude of the problem is beginning to sink in. The Director is now fairly aghast. "A billion years longer than the age of the universe?"

  "No, sir, a billion times longer than the universe's 20 billion years."

  "Jesus. But computers are getting faster every day isn't it just a matter of time before they bridge the gap?"

  "Except for older encrypted files, no sir. In fact, it's just the opposite. Faster computers help encryption far more than decr
yption."

  "What? How can that be?"

  "Because it's easier to generate a key than it is to crack it, increases in computational horsepower help encryption far more than decryption. Adding just one more bit to a key doubles the number of permutations, and thus computer time. A 256bit key isn't merely twice as tough as a 128-bit key, it's as many times tougher than the 128-bit key is on its own."

  The Director brightens with understanding. "Because it's 2 to the 256th power? It's like two 128-bit keys multiplied against each other."

  He's beginning to get it thinks Bleth. "Yes, sir! So, no matter how fast our computers become, it's an effortless thing for encryption technology to stay ahead by increasing key bit length. Not even just stay ahead, but increase the gap. Think of it this way: for every penny decryption gains, encryption gains a billion dollars. Forever. Ever since PCs became powerful enough to run Phil Zimmermann's PGP that's been a foregone conclusion. It was Game Over the moment the game began."

  "Shit! It's that bad?"

  "Actually, sir, it's far, far worse, especially with factoring attacks on asymmetric encryption. It is a million million quadrillion times more difficult to factor a product than to generate one. That's 10 to the 27th power. So, for every penny that decryption gains due to computational increases in processing power, asymmetric encryption gains a stack of $100 bills about 1,074 light years in length. Or, 33,941,566 round trips to the sun."

  "A stack? Not laid end-to-end?" the Director asks, facetiously.

  Bleth smiles thinly. "Yes, sir. Right now, there is encryption software which support huge key lengths, like 4096 and bigger. A 4096-bit key couldn't be broken if every atom in the universe were used to construct a giant computer and it chewed on it for 20 billion years. That's why the NSA fought so long and hard to prevent civilian encryption software from becoming ubiquitous. 'Every day the dike doesn't break is a victory' is how one NSA official put it back in 1992. When that proved unstoppable, they then tried to force 56-bit DES as the standard because they could break DES. When that didn't work, they tried to implement key-escrow1 under Clipper. Director Freeh was a tireless supporter of it, as you may recall."