Cypherpunks list - CFP: What the Hack '05 and Blind Signature Expiration Party
HIP '97 and the Summer that surrounded it represented a pivotal event in my and many other attendee's lives. 1997 was the peek of the Crypto Wars: while strong cryptography was spreading rapidly throughout the world from authors outside the U.S., most, if not all, I consider dear friends, the U.S. Government continued to insist on imposing draconian export regulations. 3DES? 1024-bit RSA? Forget it.
In about May '97, PGP, Inc. released printed copies of the PGP 5 source code in full compliance with the U.S. export regulations in effect at the time. Electronic copy was illegal, but printed books were fine. Having attended the source code release event, at a Cypherpunks meeting, I walked away with two copies of the printed source. The source code books spanned many boxes. I hurt my back lifting those heavy boxes into the trunk of my car. My back to this day never fully recovered. Equally in compliance with the export laws, I immediately fedexed those boxes at my own expense to individuals in Europe standing by with scanners equipped with sheet feeders to OCR the source.
Three months later, the OCR effort had stalled. While most pages had been OCR'ed, passing the per-page checksums, many pages remained unprocessed. In some cases this was because one of the numerous proof readers failed to return the result. In the more challenging cases it was because the checksum differentiated between spaces and tabs. We learned that consumer-level OCR programs are dismal at differentiating between 5 or 6 leading spaces. Or a tab.
At HIP '97 on a camp ground near Amsterdam, many breakthroughs happened.
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My precise words, if I recall correctly, were: "Come Hell or high water, before HIP is over, the proofreading of the PGP source code *will* be completed". Followed by a call for non-U.S. citizen volunteers to report to the Cypherpunks tent to finish the job. And finish the job they did. Visualize a scene most akin to "The Matrix", with a gaggle of volunteers frantically working on a row of computers held up by beer crates, writing scripts to brute force the OCR output past the checksums, while a raging party with dancers literally hanging off the rafters took up the core of the tent space, music blasting from the sound system in the early morning hours. Special thanks go to Ian Grigg, who lead the team of volunteers.
On the last day of HIP, the last page of the PGP 5 source had passed the last checksum. As the volunteers retired to bed after in most cases over 48 hours of straight work, one lone hold-out decided that now that the source code had been legally exported and turned into electronic form, somebody ought to compile it. He proceeded to compile the PGP 5 source on a PC that I had hand-carried to HIP in my luggage. The source compiled without errors. I was sound asleep at the time. By the time I woke up, cryptography had entered a new era: the U.S. Government, and in fact the entire world, woke up to a day from which on the only path remaing to stem the flow of strong crypto out of the U.S. was to ban books. And even the staunchest advocates of cryptographic export regulations knew that albeit the U.S. Supreme Court Justices may perhaps be bamboozled by declarations of the dangers of this new "Internet" thing, banning books was a proposal not in the least novel to the Court, standing no chance of meeting with the Justices approval.
Cornered into an untenable position and with no help from the courts in sight, the U.S. Government eventually acknowledged the inevitable and relaxed the exports laws for strong cryptography to the point of insignificance in January of 2000.
