How to Overthrow the Government

Move over, Democrats and Republicans, Liberals, Socialists and Fascists.
Here come the Cryptolibertarians, the wirehead heirs of Thomas Jefferson
and Henry David Thoreau.

Politics for the really cool

By Josh McHugh

"THIS IS A COOL HOLIDAY," says Sameer Parekh over a July 4 breakfast in a
cafe near the University of California at Berkeley. "It's the day we
celebrate overthrowing the government."

A disheveled 22yearold, 135 pounds, shirttails down to the knees of his
jeans, with a 4inch black goatee hanging from a cherubic face, Parekh is
no violent revolutionary out to establish a dictatorship of the
proletariat. Parekh is a libertarian of a new sort. His weapon: software.

Parekh traffics in a substance known among his peers as "strong crypto,"
cryptographic software massively stronger than the stuff American companies
are allowed to export. Cryptography is the science of scrambling messages
so they cannot be read by prying eyes. It is the lifeblood of telephone
commercecredit card verifications, bank teller machine transactions, wire
transfers. It is useful to crooks. And it is magnificently
antiauthoritarian.

Encrypted with a sufficiently powerful code, a cellular phone conversation
becomes untappable, a written message or computer file indecipherable.
Federal authorities are attempting to limit the spread of this technology
abroad. But they are no match for Parekh and other rebels with his
programming skills.

For the last three years Parekh has been mixing sophisticated computer
science with libertarian philosophy, selling a cryptographic product made
in an undisclosed foreign country through an Anguillan subsidiary. His
company, C2Net, thereby skirts U.S. export restrictions.

Looking further out, cryptography's challenge to Washington's
authorityindeed, to that of all governmentsis daunting. Even if the
federal government can somehow keep strong crypto out of the hands of
Muammar Qaddafiextremely doubtful at this pointit would still have all
manner of domestic users to worry about.