It is a place from which the swots can look down on the rest of the world and know they are superior – because they are. But the conflict between the swots and the normals is not just philosophical In two crucial areas it is practical and dirty. These are cryptography and sex.It is cryptography that will change the world more. The critical discovery was made in 1975 by a mathematician called Whitfield Diffie, who was also around CFP, dressed as you would expect in a beard and a business suit, under blond hair that came down to his nipples. The workings out of his discovery could prove a godsend to terrorists, drug-dealers and anyone else with reason to conceal his activities from government (there is already an encrypted news- letter for paedophiles circulating on the Internet). But it will also be essntial to doing international business.What Diffie discovered was a way to lock up information using two mathematical keys, one to lock and one to unlock, instead of the single key used by such systems as Enigma. The two keys were mathematically related, so that anything encrypted with the one could only be decrypted with the other, but there was no possible way to deduce from one the identity of the other One of the keys must be kept secret, as before.

But the other can be given away to everyone in the world, which gives the system its name, public key encryption. Using my public key, anyone can encrypt a message which only I can decrypt with my private key. If I have the sender’s public key, then I can reply with the same assurance that only the original sender can read it. Strong encryption, which means encryption that the American National Security Agency cannot break, is considered so powerful that it is illegal to export it from the US under the arms control regulations.One of the most popular figures at the conference was under investigation as a possible arms dealer: a quiet, bearded man in a suit and tie named Phil Zimmermann. What he did was to write and release a public-key program called, with typical nerd understatement, PGP, for Pretty Good Privacy.

This was just after the Gulf War, when a rumour swept the Net that the US government would shortly ban “strong” encryption. A friend of Zimmermann’s drove around for two hours, with a laptop and a modem, uploading PGP from public phones to any bulletin board he knew with Internet connections. That is why Zimmermann is under investigation by a Federal Grand Jury, even though he did not himself place the program where it could be exported by others Still less did he export it himself. It is just that once PGP had been placed on the Internet, even on an American computer, it could be retrieved from anywhere else on the Internet. There are no frontiers that work there.PGP is, so far as anyone knows, completely uncrackable by any government on earth. It is not very easy to use, but it is much easier than any of the competing schemes. In fact, one former member of the NSA at the conference suggested that PGP be deliberately exported to China, to give the democrats there a weapon in their struggle against the government.However it is not just terrorists, libertarians and the citizens of totalitarian countries who need strong encryption.