Crypto -- Freedom Book of the Month from Free-Market.Net: The Freedom Network

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Freedom Book of the Month for February 2001:

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government -- Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
by Steven Levy
Viking, 2000, 356 pp.

Most of us remember the heady days of PGP 2.x. The availability of strong crypto was going to be a watershed for liberty. Some "cypherpunks" -- and a lot of libertarians who used the technology, whether we understood it completely or not -- even thought that it could mean the end of the nation-state and the advent of a society in which markets would no longer operate under the long shadow of government taxation, regulation and surveillance.

We may have been right.

The subtitle of Steven Levy's new book tells it all: "How the Code Rebels Beat the Government -- Saving Privacy in the Digital Age." Anyone looking for a non-technical history of modern encryption will be well served by "Crypto," at least when it comes to the mainstream of the development of "public key" technology.

In the pages of "Crypto," you'll meet Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman, who brought the public key idea (a method of encryption that made wide use of encryption practical by splitting the "keys" into parts, one of which could be openly distributed)... well, to the public (the book also reveals the discovery of public key by cryptologists working in the British intelligence community, several years earlier).

You'll follow Rivest, Shamir and Adleman as they develop the RSA algorithm which powered the first stong encryption available to businesses and individuals. You'll meet David Chaum, the father of digital currency, and Ralph Merckle, whose work as a student led him to a breakthrough that made Diffie and Hellman's vision achievable. And, of course, Phil Zimmermann, who had the audacity to unleash a revolution on the world in the form of a free -- and, for all practical purposes, unbreakable -- privacy program called "Pretty Good Privacy," or PGP.

You'll also meet the people on the other side of "the Triple Fence" -- the three layers of electrified, barbed wire surrounding the headquarters of the National Security Agency -- and get an inside look at their struggle to put the genie of strong crypto back in the bottle.

And, finally, you'll meet the cypherpunks: the small group of visionaries who saw (and see) encryption in terms of an embryonic revolution. While Levy doesn't center the book around them -- as in former works such as the seminal "Hackers," Levy is as fascinated with the story itself as much as with the implications it raises, and has a lot of ground to cover -- he doesn't give them short shrift, either.

Today, the visionaries are still at work, their dreams as yet unrealized. But the infrastructure is there, and it is being used. Visible to us are the "new country" projects like Laissez Faire City, intent on making government as we know it superfluous. Beneath the surface, there are no doubt more ambitious projects building underground economies that function in an environment of effective laissez faire. By design, by intent, and as a direct consequence of strong encryption, the day may yet come when government, regardless of its will to power or popular support for its goals, may simply be removed from the marketplace.

"Crypto" explains how we got there.

Order "Crypto" from Laissez Faire Books for $25.95.

Visit Steven Levy's home page.

Check out the commercial or freeware versions of "Pretty Good Privacy."

Laissez Faire City is one of the most ambitious "new country" projects made possible by strong crypto.

See Free-Market.Net's directory of resources for everything from the latest news to the latest tools related to crypto.

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edited by Thomas L. Knapp

Past Winners:

January 2001: Total Freedom by Chris Matthew Sciabarra

Freedom Book of the Year 2000: Forge of the Elders by L. Neil Smith

December 2000: The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto