Here’s a transcript of Bruce Sterling’s address to the Global Challenges, Trends and Best Practices in Cryptography conference in DC. Bruce gives us a long, cranky and provocative State-of-the-Union for crypto, IP, and military intelligence.

So: flame on. Here’s the story as I see it. The big story about crypto is a power struggle between two American tribes: geeks and spooks. Occasionally innocent people blunder into this situation, but they get lost, either because they don’t understand the technology (that’s what geeks say) or they’re not to pry any further into stuff beyond the reach of mere civilians (that’s what the spooks say).

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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. …

I’m just declaring that rule by spooks does not work because of civics. Spooks have no checks and balances. You don’t get to sue them. They’re never held accountable. They’re not elected. They don’t worry about return on investment and they don’t answer to the stockholders. They don’t even have to bury their own mistakes; they usually get the diplomats to do that for them. Do you think they’re any smarter now than they were during Iran Contra? Or any less reckless?

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