Viridian Note 00283: Geeks and Spooks Some time ago my friend and prominent industry journalist Steven Levy wrote this book in my hand here, which is called CRYPTO, and its subtitle is HOW CODE REBELS BEAT THE GOVERNMENT. That's a good snappy subtitle, it makes the ol' product jump right off the shelf. But code rebels did not in fact beat the government, unless you think that the National Bureau of Standards is the government.

The truer and sadder story of crypto was that the spooks and the geeks both beat the hell out of our democratic process, rendering lawyers, consumers, the Congress, the industry, and the Administration totally irrelevant, and leaving crypto as a blasted technical wasteland, in a kind of Afghan-style feud, where every single party was necessarily a crook, or a scofflaw, or a deceiver, or weirdly suspect, and there was no legitimacy, and no common ground, and still, today, no good method to assemble any.