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existence in their databases, and these agencies are most likely colluding in the support of these false identities. Imagine lending money to someone on the strength of an excellent credit report, only to find that you lent money to a convicted scam artist who sold out his partners so he could receive a fake ID. Who would you sue? (One of the things anonymous information services, to be covered later, will be good for is soliciting the truth behind such government lies, e.g., by offering money for a CD-ROM containing the true names and locations of those in the WitSec program. Anyone with access to this database is a potential seller, and can accept payment untraceably. It’s going to be an interesting world.) There are strong pressures building for issuance of national identity cards, perhaps using smart cards, especially for control of immigration, travel, “deadbeat dads,” and terrorism. In a free society, those who wish to deal only with actual, provable true names would, of course, be free to refuse interactions with nyms, true names being just another credential, sometimes offered, sometimes not.
    Digital pseudonyms, the creation of persistent network personas that cannot be forged by others and yet are unlinkable to the “true names” of their owners, are finding major uses in ensuring free speech, in allowing controversial opinions to be aired, and in providing for economic transactions that cannot be blocked by local governments. The technology being deployed by the Cypherpunks and others means their identities, nationalities, and even which continents they are on are untraceable—unless their owners choose to reveal this information. This alters the conventional “relationship topology” of the world, allowing diverse interactions without external governmental regulation, taxation, or interference.
    Public-Key Cryptography
    Cryptography is about more than the stereotypical sending of secret messages. The combination of strong, unbreakable public-key cryptography and virtual network communities in cyberspace will produce profound changes in the nature of economic and social systems. Crypto anarchy is the cyberspatial realization of anarcho-capitalism, transcending national boundaries and freeing individuals to consensually make the economic arrangements they wish to make. The fundamental notion of modern public-key cryptography is that the key for locking, for example, a box, is different from the key for unlocking the box. The owner of a box can then publicize the form of the key needed to lock “his” box, and keep the unlocking key a secret. Anyone can then lock a message in Bob’s box with his “public-key,” but no one except Bob can ever unlock that box, not even with all the computer power in the world. From this basic point flow all sorts of variations and extensions. An alternative metaphor is that of the envelope: anyone can place something inside one of Bob’s envelopes and seal it, but only Bob can open his envelopes. (In the chains of remailers we just discussed, envelopes-within-envelopes are used, for as many stages as are desired.)
    Cryptography revolves around local control of some secret. For example, a user has a private key which only he knows. Others can send him messages, using his public key, but only he can decode or decrypt them. So long as this key is kept secret, the encrypted communication cannot be read by others. The security depends on the length of the keys, the number of bits in the keys. A “weak” key of forty or fifty bits, for example, can be cracked with a personal computer. Stronger keys of sixty-four or eighty bits are preferable, though they’re still not truly secure. And it is no more difficult to use ciphers with an effective strength of several hundred bits; such ciphers should withstand brute-force attacks for centuries, perhaps millennia or longer. Public-key cryptography has the important property that