International borders -- gone! The IRS -- crippled! Big government -- on the run! And all because of the spread of cryptography. It's one of the enduring fantasies of hardcore Net-libertarianism: Securely encrypted protection of communications in cyberspace will free humanity from Big Brother.
On April 14th, the Internet took a giant step toward such a future after the release of FreeS/WAN 1.0, a free software program aimed at facilitating the secure encryption of data on the Net. It's the brain-child of two libertarian philanthropists, at least one of whom, John Gilmore, has long advocated using encryption to resist government intrusions.
As it stands now, FreeS/WAN is designed to run on a computer inserted between a local area network and the Internet. It also requires, according to FreeS/WAN programmer Henry Spencer, "prearrangement" with another network running the software for it to work. But Spencer predicts that FreeS/WAN functionality will eventually be included in software that can run on a single user's computer.
The FreeS/WAN software was written outside of the United States, primarily in Canada, in order to get around U.S. laws that forbid the export of powerful encryption tools. Could the software be, eventually, a tool for making such laws meaningless? That's certainly the hope of its designers. Although not all citizens of cyberspace may regard this sort of crypto-libertarian utopia as the ideal future society, such a future certainly seems more plausible now.
