message, which he PGP encrypts with the public key of a colleague in Phoenix. This he pastes into an email composition window. Above the encrypted message he adds some curious text which looks like a simple computer language and includes several e-remailers' addresses. The entire email is then again PGP encrypted, but with "To's" public key. An envelope within an envelope. Only the email's header ( i.e. , From, To, Subject) is in plaintext. The Subject line reads one question.
He sits back for several moments of calm satisfaction. Then he looks up at his assistant and says, "You've put enormous work into this, Tom. We couldn't have done it without you. Would you do the honors?"
"Yes, sir! Thank you!" Tom steps behind the man's desk, places his hand on the mouse, moves the cursor to the Send icon, pauses, and clicks the mouse button. At the speed of light the email is instantly en route.
"Iacta alea est," says the man.
"The die is cast," echoes Tom.
The exclamation was attributed to Julius Caesar upon his crossing of the river Rubicon in 49 B.C. against the Senate's orders to lay down his military command. By invading central Italy from the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul (now northern Italy), Caesar kicked off a civil war with his former ally Pompey, a Roman general whose rule extended to Syria.
"Not that you aspire to become Caesar," Tom qualifies.
"No," sighs the man, "but they will accuse me of it all the same."
Before the two men had finished speaking, the email had already crossed the Atlantic. "To" is a covert e-remailer in Berlin used by only several dozen international libertarians for urgent business. "To" picked up his web-based email from several different public terminals which required no ID or sign-up to log in. Always with Karl Heinz Kolb was his powerful laptop, loaded with virtually every encryption program in existence. It had built-in software and hardware security devices to foil any third-party attempt at usage or data downloading. His friends joked that it would probably convert any snoop into argon gas. Kolb was quietly revered for how seriously he took his computer privacy. There was none his crafty equal in all of Berlin.
Sipping his chai tea at the Potsdamer Platz CyberCafé, he sits down at a terminal, logs onto his Yahoo! account, opens his Inbox, and clicks on the waiting email from
[email protected] . Once, Kolb thought aglet was an odd name and so he looked it up. He was surprised to learn that it wasn't a name, but a thing. It is the plastic end of shoelaces that allows you to thread them through the eyeholes. Without aglets, we'd all be wearing sandals or loafers. Whoever aglet was, he evidently appreciated the small, overlooked things which made bigger things not only possible, but common.
The email is a PGP message, which he saves on a floppy. He knows that it has been encrypted with one of his public keys. The "one" in the Subject line's one question means Priority One.
Most public terminals do not have PGP installed, so the 31 year-old Berliner must use his laptop. This is really the only downside to web-based email from public computers. Kolb doesn't mind — in fact, he considers it a vital part of the process as he has no intention of sending email from the same terminal he receives at. Not even from different accounts, as the IP address would still be the same. Physically breaking up the email chain by using different computers is what makes Kolb's remailing service so solid. His laptop is the only link between them.
Analyzing his Yahoo! anonymous account would reveal only log-ons from public terminals and the receipt of encrypted remails. He never emailed anyone from that account. Thus, the Kripos — the Kriminal Polizei — could not learn from Yahoo! who he was, what he was receiving, or from whom.
Ghosts communicating with a ghost.
Kolb deletes the email from his Inbox, empties the Trash, shreds (he had installed Eraser on the server) Today's History from the computer,