Molon Labe! Read Free Page B

and logs out. He pays the 5,, leaves the café and disappears down the U-Bahn stairwell a block down the street. Twenty-three minutes later he is at a university library which also has public terminals. He boots up his laptop, inserts the floppy, and decrypts the email with his secret key. Following the enclosed forwarding instructions he prepares to send the remaining PGP message kernel down the remailing chain. The first recipient is a Copenhagen partner of the Berlin operation, so the message is encrypted on Kolb's laptop with the Dane's PGP public key. Thus, what Kolb sends is different from what he had received, in case the two emails were ever somehow compared with each other. The two remailers' public keys were known to precisely 37 people, all trusted libertarians.
    From Copenhagen the kernel will skip through Helsinki, Krakow, and Tacoma before landing in Phoenix.
    Four hours later the final recipient has it. Its Wyoming origin simply cannot be discerned from backtracking the IP packet flow. Physically, the trail went stone cold at Terminal #14 in the Berlin Technische Universität library, and that's assuming investigators could backtrack all the way to Copenhagen — and then to Berlin. Learning even that useless dead-end would require an expensive and prolonged multinational intelligence effort. The Subject line reads Lose 24lbs. In Just 5 Weeks!! Most people would have immediately deleted such an apparent spam, but the man in Phoenix had been awaiting precisely this email.
    Not that he was obese. The message was a grain of sand hiding on a beach. The "24lbs." meant that he had to proceed within 24 hours. The "5" told him the scope of the operation — 5 counties. Hands shaking with anticipation, he uses his PGP secret key to decrypt the message. It reads:
The thunderbolt falls before the noise of it is heard in the skies, prayers are said before the bell is rung for them; he receives the blow that thinks he himself is giving it, he suffers who never expected it, and he dies that look'd upon himself to be the most secure: all is done in the Night and Obscurity, amongst Storms and Confusion.
    It was a quote from Gabriel Naudé, a 17th century Paris political author.
    The Phoenix man smiles, and then laughs out loud to himself. Four years of planning and work! It was actually going to happen! He grabs his laptop, kisses his wife good-bye and says that he'll be back in a few hours. He drives to the main downtown library on Central Avenue, walks up to the second floor where the public terminals are, signs on with an alias as a guest, and begins to work. Within an hour, the lives of 8,994 people across the Southwest are changed by an encrypted group email. The message is simple:
    Solivitur ambulando. It is solved by walking.
    The problem is settled by action — the theoretical by the practical.
    8,994 people amongst 3,704 households already knew what to do.
    2006 USA political news
    The UN "Second Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects" meets in July. The conference votes to bind all member states to the mandatory registration of all firearms, effective by 1 January 2017.
    Private gun sale activity doubles the next month.
    Chelsea Clinton, graduated from Stanford even more liberal than Hillary (if such were possible), has taken up with one of Louis Farrakhan's lieutenants in Chicago. "Mother, this is my 'village' now," she was rumored to have explained. Even for Hillary, this was too much and she soon after blows a gasket. During a Senate reelection campaign speech she utterly loses her temper at a heckler and is led off stage screaming profanities. The Washington Post laments her having been "provoked by a white male chauvinist." The leftist National Organization of Women gives Hillary a titular directorship and quietly backburners her with an annual salary of $180,000, which nicely covers her Prozac ® habit.
    2006 USA social news
As the cultural revolution took generations