Cyberspace

The pirates of the 21st century

In the fight against the terror police and secret services build up the police state. But a group of computer genii wages a data war on the Internet against the authorities. Report from the world of the encoded messages

Of Thomas Fischermann

The art of the power is the art of the disappearance. (Paul Virilio)

The computer has just reported in the office to the time that an e-mail of the town clerk has come in. The man is a popular informer for this story. One which enjoys a reputation in the scene of the cryptic counts, the inventor and user of electronic disguising and encoding techniques. But one cannot simply select and read an e-mail of the town clerk. For several minutes an underground network has lasted until the computer is included in the "distributed town", hides this deeply under the surface of the Internet and has to be entered only with the correct code words.

The "distributed town" doesn't look at first sight differently than many web pages on the Internet. One can send e-mails there, news pins boards to blacks and chat rooms go to. But surfer can rely here on their anonymity differently than on the ordinary Internet. Nobody will intercept their news. A number of techniques which were accessible to at the most secret services a quarter of a century ago encodes electronic messages up to the unrecognizable state, lets them dash as putatively senseless data dust around the globe, blurs all traces on the long journey. "aANQR1DBw04D/NSEz31qI +8 QEADwytY which is", the message of the town clerk starts with "Cyphertext". A message encoded mathematically which only its scheduled receiver can read. Something readable appears to a couple of mouse clicks, a password, and finite on the screen. "Thomas, you let me think about the questions. Tomorrow, I report again."

Welcome in the mysterious world of the Cypherpunks! For three days, it was somehow then festquatschte in May 1992, when Eric Hughes with his friend Tim May dropped in in Californian Santa Cruz on a visit, and themselves. Hughes was end of 20 and one gifted mathematicians of the University of Berkeley at that time; May had gone physicists for the chip company Intel and a couple of years before with an enormous block of shares ten years more oldly, a more formerly under the arm in "disability pension". One could notice fast that the two scientists got on well: You shared a similar taste for western ravine and cool sunglasses, a fascination for computer technology and more than a healthy degree of persecution mania. They primarily shared common political convictions.

Both counted themselves as one of the environment of the libertarians, the supporters of an extremist liberal ideology which is quite common in the white American middle shift. Libertäre Americans contrast with the state particularly sceptically in all its manifestations from the police up to the tax recoverer; states wouldn't completely abolish and the regiment leave to the free markets some of them with their steering wheels and organs best of all. About such vigorous body of thought it was also at the conversation marathon of the two friends in that May. It would hardly be worth mentioning if the duo hadn't been convinced either to hold the key in its hand for its political dream ideas.

May and Hughes still formed a loose association of like-minded in fall 1992 which should become one of the most unusual and most obscure political movements of all times. You mentioned the Cypherpunks, free to themselves to a science fiction style direction which had come in fashion at the end of the 19th century. You were a conglomeration from scientists and dreamers decorated highly, computer genii and political activist, lawyers and also criminals. They claimed to be rebels in the cyberspace, Weltveränderer in sneakers and T-shirts which understood their laptop computers as weapons. You would meet for irregular "physical meetings", their Cypherpunk mailing list would climb to one of the hottest Internet debate places with almost 2000 subscribers; they claimed to be the technical elite which creates the infrastructure for a utopian, lawless cyberspace. And some of them ten years later and after the terrorist attacks of September 11th see their great hour come today of all things: as the last bulwark against the supervision company.

The Internet economy as we know it today still was in its child's shoes at the beginning of the nineties. But, for a digital future, visions had already prospered far in circles of the technician avant-garde which Hughes and May frequented: At the American west coast one debated already as electronic mail will replace almost all paper shipments in and between enterprises within the next years that all money and equity businesses would be misplaced of the branch of a bank into the cyberspace, that products would be as delivered to music and films and news of a day merely still by data line. Bigger and bigger shares of our work routines and our leisure time would happen in front of the screens.

A handful books and many essays turned up for topics like "the sovereign individual" by which one understood somebody who organizes his life and his business in the cyberspace and tolerates no more state about himself at that time. Named Laissez a temporary office opened fair city center in Costa Rica and an organization a manner wanted to offer citizenship more virtually. Political concepts like Cyber anarchy and virtual regions created it for the first time in the seminars of political science and legal faculties at that time. Wasn't it a children's game to slip by all these data and news and products state eavesdroppers and inspectors, at policemen, tax recoverers and Zöllnern? Would a such irregular, lawless cyberspace force the hated states into the knees?

One might think about such ideologies what one liked. Tim May explained quite openly at that time that the Kryptografie also will play murderers and terrorists, racialist hate speakers and kidnappers into the hands; these were necessary evils of the new liberty, he said. The founders wrote autocratically in one of their lampoons "Cypherpunks break the laws which they don't like". But or the thing technically was for many experts as feasible and even unavoidable at that time so so. Methods to the extreme encoding of data had slipped away from the secret services in the septuagenarian and eighties. Armed forces must powerlessly and police watch programs like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) found distribution in all the world and had to be cracked hardly with acceptable effort how in the nineties -- neither with the supercomputers of the secret services themselves. "Cypherpunks will write programs", the battle cry which Eric Hughes gave to the movement founded freshly in a little manifesto was. You would lay out secret electronic mail boxes, found electronic banks and sell with electronic money, just create a network of communication channels encoded extremely quite practically. "The change won't come politically", the con-founder Tim May added, " he will come technologically . " -- " ", governments the industrial world, you tired giant made of meat and steel John Perry Barlow raised in his declaration of independence a couple of years later the cyberspace; the rancher, earlier song authors of the group of Gateful Dead and enthusiastic civil rights campaigners were climbed to an icon of the movement. "You have no more sovereignty where we assemble."

Lima, 2003rd Caryn Mladen had prepared her trip very well to Peru in May. But the baggage looked much unusual for a Canadian tourist. Laptop computers. Adapter. Computer software. A list with the names of civil right groups which have got into difficulties with the police or with political opponents. "Peru has a story as a particularly well-organized police state", the 38-year-old jurist from Toronto says about her two and a half-week Undercover journey today. "And still although the country is democratic now, many old strengths are at work. No-one knows whether the old supervision apparatus still are in use and who operates them."

Caryn is a computer expert with extensive knowledge in questions of the protection of data privacy. She has computer books written and a newspaper column, already has traveled by hitch-hikers across Africa, have gone through a Syria trip during the first gulf war ("I felt safer than in New York city center there") and Far Eastern Massagetechniken studies. She says, but simply I needed ", the quite recently something new one, a fresh challenge. You . and simply then it has happened in December 2001 " five like-minded ones, everyone were fascinated of the protection of data privacy and of encoding technologies. Three lawyers, a doctor and a computer specialist with contacts into the Cypherpunk scene. The group acted the name Privaterra and foreign aid wanted to do the unusual manner. Civil right groups would you give encoding technology modern instruments to the hand in developing countries, the weapons of the Krypto movement.

The group already in several countries south and Central America was away by then, like-minded colleagues in different countries of Africa. The activist says "the needs are often very different", " quite a number of groups have so little technical idea, these need things like a virus protection program first once . " computers, e-mail and the Internet have developed into the indispensable tool for human right groups at the search for political prisoners at the coordination of campaigns in all the world long ago. But it is the disadvantage that addresses of activists are stored on the computers of these organizations now, confidential letters and other body of evidence.

Caryn and her friends can have taught to dozens of civil rights campaigners, encode such data like one, hide on the hard disk or file on a safe filing place in the distant cyberspace completely in case a computer is confiscated by the police or gets lost at a "burglary". You showed the civil rights campaigners how one protects himself from the attacks of hostilely minded hackers which don't seldom work for secret services either. You taught them as one encodes his communications and latches himself into the secret communication networks, the Krypto activists have cleverly spread out under the surface of the Internet instead of sending an ordinary e-mail which could read like a postcard on its way of everybody. Who the opponents are ", against which we work?", Caryn has frequently already asked and not always got an answer. Sometimes these are governments, sometimes loyal members of former governments which still continue to work in underground. Privaterra can admittedly internationally, humanely be helped Rights Watch and other human right groups at the choice of its "customers" of amnesty. So that the instruments don't get into false hands.

More than ten years after the foundation meetings of the Cypherpunks have moved some of their political dreamings of the reality more nearly than ever. Encoding of data which no more curious civil servant can crack whether in Peru or at the American sniffing service NSA? A wealth of such techniques is available in the Internet for everyone today and software manufacturers with names like Martus software or Hacktivismo even have written custom-made programs for political activists and civil right groups on the Internet. Caryn and hers had nevertheless to make a painful knowledge to traveling data rebels. Technology may work but the application is the much bigger problem. "These aren't computer experts and we can make none from them", says Caryn. "These groups cannot afford any fault but at the same time, their communication must get bugproof to 100 per cent."

"Most people with whom we work have extremely good reasons for the secrecy", she says. Death threats, unannounced raids in the dawn, unexplained burglaries to the offices of organizations. A "customer" of Privaterra "someplace in Central America" was found murdered later. The Vietnamese activist first was sent to Pham Hong Son because of "spying" behind bars for 13 years a couple of weeks because he had e-mails exchanged with international democracy groups ago. "This isn't a funny adventure here, we must most take care that we harm nobody", says a colleague of Caryn. China had an embankment around the entire Chinese Internet drawn a couple of years ago and Beijing Internet cafés marched up for policemen for control, a team wrote without delay a program for breaking through the virtual wall of Cypherpunks as. But they withdrew it after short enthusiasm again because the use of the program left on the Internet, and would have brought difficulties first properly traces suspicious of themselves.

Las Vegas, the walls are covered with black cloths in the Alexis park congress center in August 2003. once a year. Strong stewards build up in front of the doors, the police send special strengths and really international secret services allegedly sound the land out. The colored community of the hackers invades the desert of Nevada: for the "DefCon" conference, the greatest convention for everyone who knows a lot about penetrating into strange computer systems. Hordes of computer freaks then populate the congress halls and the deck chairs at the pool; many of the guests still have spots doughy, pale shapes in T-shirts and gigantic sandals, trendige much around the nose hip with imagination hairstyles. Computer kids.

The speaker who steps in the suit and T-shirt on the stage and with a gray floppy hat on the head end 30 doesn't like to yokes correctly at first sight here. His audience is also older and more serious than the mass of the computer children; in the middle row a couple of FBI agents have mixed with the audience and folded their arms expectantly. No miracle with the lecture title: Punish the collaborators! the topic of Bill Scannell is called. He is a veteran during these meetings: a confessing Cypherpunk, if either one which doesn't understand much of technology particularly. The energy speakers' and chainsmokers' Scannell has that company The bunker made a name to itself as a megaphone for a number of Kryptografiefirmen -- for example, which has bought a whole atom bunker in the west of England and extols it as a particularly safe resting-place since then for data. It plays the role today in which itself likes it best: that one of the alone appointed civil rights campaigner and riot brother. "We must prevent that George Bush and his Attorney General John Ashcroft turn the United States into a supervision company", says Scannell. It speaks itself on the stage in rage fast and reaps mixed reactions for this -- defiant applause, a couple of outraged spectators leave the hall. "We must make the ones who want to take the liberties of our constitution away from us the hell the life!"

It may mean much to a personal history to Bill Scannells that questions of the protection of data privacy and go the privacy for it to hearts. Scannell already has worked as a spy of the American secret service in East Berlin, it was then away in the former Eastern bloc as a journalist for years. " and it wants to have got still, like it, in totalitarian countries shuts. I was always proud of it as an American enjoys many liberties in America."

Offered as the American airline company delta in February to test a very far-reaching passenger supervisory system of the American authorities since Scannell says "a couple of lamps blew" with me. It started a protest web page with boycott calls and personal attacks on the delta boss manager, tourte by American talkshows few days later, the enterprise traveled to the delta general meeting, actually finally withdrew its plan again. It is forming a similar web page against the flight booking system Galileo at the moment. "These things are ", " of use against terrorism anyway not one bit Scannell says, they are an instrument of the law enforcement agencies for all possible other aims."

So or so Scannell queries it as a "fundamental right", to travel through the country unrecognizedly. Since the terrorist attacks this has check got more difficult, anyway if ample extra time into it has, Scannell always quarrels with the safety staff again; it makes a fun to itself to buy a bus or train ticket under false names from time to time ("Joe Cypherpunk"). "I recently have spoken on the phone to my sister about politics at the airport and I have expressed a couple of clear opinions there", it says. "And then I have noticed how everyone stared at me as if I am a terrorist. It got clear to me there that we must be here afraid to tell our opinion gradually."

The early Cypherpunks regarded it as a kind of law of nature, that the Internet age simply will deprive the authorities of the nation-states of power; that they pass beaten one day and put to the quiet themselves. But the "tired giants made of meat and steel" come to strengths two years after September 11th, 2001 again. Bush initiated a number of new law packages already few weeks after the terrorist attacks. He brought even an "office for cyberspace safety" into being. Rumors made the round fast that also encoding techniques would have helped kamikaze pilots at the planning of their stops from hacker and Cypherpunk blacksmiths Osama bin Laden; like the Cypherpunks even the stops of September 11th would have mitzuverantworten that people.

Natural is an old contentious issue in the data protection debate, whether encoding techniques are really a civil right or only a support for terrorists, scoundrels and drug barons; at times, how the U.S. government decided whether they represent a modern equivalent for a sealed envelope or a "weapon equivalent product". Was there an optimal balance between liberty and safety? The hard core around Tim May and as well Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of the encoding program PGP, stayed with it after September 11th: Protection for criminals and terrorists is a necessary price. The development can anyway hold nobody back. And weren't there also enough legitimate applications for the new technology? Where some groups plan for "Cypher dissenters" in China or Burma and even in America and rightly or wrong political Reperkussionen protection was afraid to provide the names from "disappeared" in Guantánamo Bay into the net for example? Phil Zimmermann explained on occasion succinctly "only the criminals have Kryptografie then, if Kryptografie is forbidden".

But in the safety fever after September 11th found such sayings hardly sympathizers and many law guardians and secret services sensed their chance to create a couple of facts. Their databases become the electronic eavesdrop rights of the police since then step by step and fold the secret services' fully developed, authorities, may access the databases of private enterprises increasingly in America and also in Europe and other parts of the world. "Have few people understood, it is that the books and films doesn't restrict a supervision to the world as in the case of Orwells Big Brother any more", tell Barry Steinhart, the data protection expert to the civil right group of American Civil Liberties union.

It nevertheless wasn't first the shock of September 11th which buried the old mantra of the Cypherpunk founders of the "inevitability" of a boundless privacy. It was the technical development. A just as big explosion of sniffing programs was accompanied by the explosive distribution of the computer technology and the Internet in the industrial nations in computers from networked supervision camerae at streets and airports, biol metric reconnaissance techniques and a wealth of broader technologies. The growing efficiency of computer systems also played apparently the snoopers into the hands.

Companies, state authorities and obstinate Internet investigators could never find so much out over a man thanks to the Internet which should bring the Cypherpunks once the boundless liberty after the dreams. "You have anyway zero privacy", thought Scott McNealy, the boss of the Californian computer company Sun Microsystems, a couple of years ago. "Accept with that."

In October 2003. the chief waiters New York city center has pulled up the eyebrows for one second when Jo, John and Sean have entered his fine fish restaurant in their sneakers and their casual cloths. The 30 already notice three young people with their gawky west coast attitude between the respectable business people who run here to the lunchtime otherwise around a bit. How can the waiter know also that he has three future leaders in front of himself?

"The dream of an anonymous, stateless cyberspace has burst?", the question is. Sean leans back, a thinking at this couple of moments repeats the sentence and takes himself. Sean is obviously the man for the great answers, the leader of the group. A stocky young type with a fat round face. "It everything is, burglar-proof mathematical methods, anonymous e-mail programs, anonymous surfing, even anonymous exchanges, there. One of the great problems only is: No man uses these things! They are left up to a small elite for the time being."

If Sean Hastings of small elites speaks, goes without saying: He and his friends are part of it. Hastings is a Cypherpunk. This one wants none of the sworn founder members, but a gifted young computer programmer with a rebellious vein, to teach the nation-states being afraid best of all. "How you don't write that I am a Cypherpunk it corrects, at once I don't like to leave me into drawers ", ". Write that I am very close to the philosophy of the Cypherpunks."

Hastings has taken it to the cult status in the scene. Adviser was a more obsolete for him with the title you start your own country advisably into the fingers and he bought a number of computer server and put it up at the East coast of England from the second World War on a rusty air defense station a couple of months later so at the end of the nineties. He opened the "first public data paradise of the world" there with that. He announced at that time nobody checks his computers.

The deserted armed forces station had been "conquered" and declared independent in the year 1967 of the retired officer Paddy Roy Bates. Bates sold the Royal Navy with specific shots in front of the bow once. Since then Bates holds on for the crown prince of "Sealand" and his official state businessman was Hastings for one couple of years. Hastings, his Mrs Jo and a handful hacker to the sea squeezed themselves into windowless cabins and were discreet powerfully. The crown prince let his fingers of the computers and which laid out customers her web pages and databases on his computers Hastings told nobody. Sealand finally should for the first time guarantee the complete inviolability of such data in the history.

At that time, we agreed in many conversations " been that an anonymous cyberspace needs a certain degree of a physical safety ", Hastings tells stories. Encoded messages may be still harder to crack, electronic magic hats may get more and more effective. But all the secret data must be stored nevertheless and be fed in to the Internet in any computer in the world someplace. The mystery-mongers of the world sit someplace in front of their computers and know how their data can get them to face in the plain text, discreet businessmen from Kiew, Steuerhinterzieher from the USA, secret online casino players from Brussels, Fremdgänger from Vienna, dealer forbidden Nacktbilder from Würzburg, ransom blackmailer from Bogotá and Drogenkuriere from Lucerne. And unpleasant states can cut lines, confiscate hard disks or condemn their owners to the handing out of keys everywhere there. When a couple of years ago a blasé young programmer listed all the "extremist safe" protection programs of his computer at the Internet safety fair RSA burst for a representative of the police of the collars present: "I and what your door is if enter and hold you a shooter to the head? Are your data then safe, too?"

Sean Hastings says, Sealand also wouldn't have so really sure made the Cypherpunk movement the dreams: The thing works only properly ", if we have computers everywhere in the world and distribute encoded data in small bits on all this equipment . " it plans a new computer parking space therefore again: an enormous floating platform in the international waters in front of Gibraltar. "Perhaps we give reasons for a completely new life-form there", it dreams and a web page has established about the "life to the sea". Till now, details on the business plans aren't got, however, Hastings wants to have hired engineers already, the first financing sources are tapped and the young nation also will have "weapons to the self-defense" on board. Water his wife employs Jo and laughs " to air rockets ". A joke? This isn't so quite clear.

"I by the way don't drag out there", still adds Jo and Sean twists his mouth and nods. The matter apparently hasn't been discussed controversially in the House of Hastings for the first time. "It probably will come for a visit", he says. The stateless skilled workers had to take a shower with caught rain water in the cabins of Sealand for months at that time, prepared sleepless nights never might sleeping on the deck above and the grumbling eternally the diesel generators for safety reasons. "Sealand has met my requirements of a life once and for all on strange sea constructions", says Jo.

What do Krypto rebels whom it hasn't brought on distant islands or rusty platforms in the ocean do? Several of his colleagues tell Tim May the Cypherpunk founder that he has pulled himself back as a bearded hermit and has a stately arsenal about, May doesn't have to be won for confirmations or denials. Over a well-known Krypto sapper at the American East coast he is rumored in the scene that the he programs betting systems which are unforgeable and encoded extremely for -- has entered service at the same time at the mafia. The Cypherpunk founder member Jim Bell from Vancouver even became the first official "Krypto criminal" of the scene in 2001: A judge judged, that a confused essay of the master with the title execution politics amounts to a call for stops. Bell had designed an encoded betting system with digital currency and anonymity guaranteed and the participants could have hopes of the decease of certain tax officials from the area Vancouver. Who could predict the time of the death best won the jackpot.

An insider tells the scene ", today, more don't even have many to do with the libertären ideology a little", " sometimes the smallest common denominator seems merely still to be, that maximum protection of data privacy is a good thing . " quite a number of Cypherpunks don't even mention more Cypherpunks to themselves not least because of the peculiar self-portrayal of some founders. Some rebels come along much plainly meanwhile.

So there are some companies safe from sniffing authorities, the employer of his own meanwhile which offer programs and systems for the anonymous surfing and the anonymous dispatch of e-mail in the net -- and operated with the technologies of the Krypto rebels and sometimes of confessing Cypherpunks designed also in front of the data collecting mania of advertising companies. You bear names like Zero Knowledge, Hushmail, Anonymizer or ZipLip. A New York company named iPrivacy wanted to make even the goods purchase anonymous on the Internet in between: Your customers could have shopped unrecognizedly someplace on the Internet and the transaction dealt with iPrivacy anonymously with goods delivery. Not even the from delivering companies would have learned the identity of the buyer. But iPrivacy is, such bankrupt by now quite a lot companies are in economic difficulties and the demand for their products has remained slack till now.

A number of activists from the environment of the Cypherpunks has therefore resorted to debating openly within the last years of programming. Many Cypherpunks, a founder member says, "have turned missionaries virtually, see themselves as reconnaissance planes". There is a wealth of academic projects like the OpenNet initiative of the University of Harvard, Cambridge and the University of Toronto meanwhile: He arranges a summary of Internet censorship in all the world constantly.

The electronic drudgery animal Foundation (EFF) is one of the loudest voices in the USA as a political think tank to data protection questions today, founded 1990 of a handful activists of encoding technology. This group also employs advocates who regularly give hackers, data protection experts and encoding artists legal support, and American secret services forced to move encoding techniques out or to take these of their list of the export closed "weapons".

Till now, the data protection programs simply have to be used on the market too expensively and too complicatedly for most private users. For the "anonymous surfing" for the company Anonymizer from San Diego for example have to be paid as of 30 dollars in the year, a number of extra clicks is necessary with the disadvantage that the web pages then load up more slowly than before and in many situations. And while the simply usable music exchange programs Napster and Kazaa were recording tremendous successes, more complicated Cypherpunk alternatives like Mojo nation never succeeded with themselves. Is the thing of the data protection experts rather a cultural one as a technical task anyway? "Most people simply still accept the Internet so as it is", says John Perry Barlow, author of the mentioned "declaration of independence in the cyberspace", resigned. "We simply still lack the killer application", thinks lee Tien, an on the right expert at EFF.

The office is accommodated by Sandy Sandfort Panama city, in an apartment house painted whitely in October 2003.. Balcony over balcony. Sandy belongs to which one of this, lets already herself be foreseen from the sidewalk: this one with the enormous satellite bowl in front of the window. Because Sandy Sandfort is city center for work here in sunny Panama. "Verax, Inc.", has to be read on the signpost at its door and a couple of desks, a sofa, a number of computers, are in a bald room inside, a whirring ventilator. The head of the company says "we are a mail venture Capital business here", and laughs. An enterprise which no start-up capital has got apart from the money which has got hold of Sandy privately. If everything runs according to plan, Sandy Sandfort wants to write history in its Spartan offices: A new payment system for online purchases shall arise in Panama city center. A kind of central bank with a new kind of electronic money which permits super discreet, super safe payments by Internet. One of the oldest dreams of the Cypherpunk community shall finally get true, economic liberty on the Internet.

Sandy Sandfort is 57 years old now and already has worked in Arizona and as an English teacher as a lawyer, in Costa Rica he was the star of a soap opera ("I was angry with it"). He also belonged to the first members of the Cypherpunk movement. He lives in Panama for last year and he had good reasons for the move. The payment system which he wants to build up would have to be operated never in his American native country legally.

New payment systems for the Internet, this was always regarded as the king discipline for activists of encoding technology. Web pages around web pages have filled them with concepts for a new currency world with the Internet dollar and the eGold with pre-paid Internet means of payment for sale at kiosks and elaborate Geldwäschermethoden. You should finally make authorities end with the access of the tax offices and other. Quite a number of elegant schemes for virtual exchange rings and digital cash are developed already and many of them are regarded as thought through much more elegantly and better in the scene as a Sandy's system named Neuclear. It never turned into only economic successes.

Sandy reckons an advantage for other reasons: 1 Verax Inc. brings a "killer application" of its own besides the payment system at once. Sandy Sandfort knows namely also very well about the scene of the game of chance not with a traditional roulette or canasta in casinos but with Cyber-Gambling on the Internet. Appropriate game of chance web pages have been part of the greatest sources of income of the digital economy for years but they have a problem: They are forbidden in many countries. Some law enforcement agencies, among this that one of the USA, already thin the credit card accountings of their citizens after suspicious transactions with Cyber casinos out. No wonder that many gamblers long for an alternative in all the world.

"We want to become the new payment system for the Internet here" tells Sandy Sandfort and ruckelt on its wobbly desk chair to and fro as if it can suddenly hardly expect it. Does and to be more precise one at which there aren't any difficulties or what wants to shop always, too game of chance chips, weapons " if somebody . " expressed roughly in simplified terms? Customers will transfer money to Verax by bank, postal order and possibly even bar one day. At Verax they get a credit granted for this and can bet in casinos from this time on. There aren't any laws against this method in Panama. Sandfort and its colleagues keep the true identity of a player for themselves; new Krypto technologies shall make sure that the player remains anonymous and that no-one can nevertheless slip up.

But what happens if the American authorities forbid transfers to Verax of a day just the same as to the gambling casinos? Sandy laughs. "Alone for this reason we want also of hotels, journey companies, of Amazon.com to take care perhaps even one day as fast as possible that our means of payment is accepted of as many dealers as possible on the Internet. For what exactly the customer has spent his money, this is no longer comprehensible in our system. He then can always deny plausibly to have used it for the Cyber game of chance."

If the payment system runs first, Sandfort perhaps also wants to license it for other suppliers; its programmer skin, a 33-year-old Dane, has already made various thought experiments to this. "Neuclear works like ancient exchange systems ", it says, " carried out only with high tech methods. You can theoretically build up all possible currency systems with this system. If you want, you build up a Cyber currency which is based on gold as a safety. Or still improve on opium. I would become me broken laughter a joke, if somebody would this try . ". - and, already, the programmer already processes skin at a version of his bank program which isn't put on a single computer any more but distributes on many, many individual computers in the whole world. If this works first, then which bank laws still can be used at all? Do perfect digital finance oases arise on this way in the cyberspace soon? Parallel working areas, with which one can conceal his trade, security and game of chance business once and for all?

"Oh, know this is the problem with all Cypherpunks", says Sandy Sandfort. "These have this vision that they want to disappear completely to a parallel world. Mostly, the world doesn't work it says goes to its desk over here and indicates to the blanket . " so. "Look, I could sit with the best security software of the world here, and any spy or the police then could have installed a tiny camera in the lamp which takes everything I type. Believe me: We still will make much progress. You will never be but quite invisible in the cyberspace."

Quelle: ZEIT.de