Re: <nettime> the architecture of survival

[Drazen Pantic <drazen@location1.org>]

felix@openflows.org wrote:

> Thanks for this clarification! A question about the importance. What was
> your experience, did people feel much safer when using encryption? Do you
> think they would have communicated differently without it?


That is an interesting question. My impression is that people did feel
much more safer, and had the basic trust that their messages would not be
intercepted and stored in some database for further use. Back in '97-99 no
one had the clear picture of how Serbian regime will use information it
was obviously gathering. I have written some about it on nettime,
especially about their attempts to implant a "sleeper" into OpenNet. What,
up to my knowledge, did not happen.

Either way, the surveillance was there and people did feel the need to
protect themselves, one way or another. Use of encryption was one of the
ways to make it more difficult for the government to collect information
and evidence about traitors and mercenaries...How much that feeling of
being protected did eliminate self-censorship I do not know, but I think
it was not entirely without effect.

Finally, this technique of seamless encryption led to an interesting
technique. Namely, last mile traffic from home computer to OpenNet dial-up
server was clearly unencrypted. So, some people used to dial-in from
different locations or send email using public Web access places. That
proved to be successful (whatever the success might be), so that technique
of constant move was much used later in '99 and later...

D




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