Molon Labe! (3 page)

...The Free World does not understand the crucial point at issue: Unless a conflict is first won spiritually, it is unlikely that it can be won materially. Ideology is the bridge to spiritual victory.

— Stefan T. Possony,
Psyops

Natrona County, Wyoming

February 2006

"Good morning, sir. Here are last night's figures. We have sufficient numbers for five, and almost six."

The dark-haired man behind his desk nods and smiles. He is distinguished like an executive, but also tanned and rugged like a rancher. Little wonder. He's both.

"Great news, Tom. Five will work. Five is all we need for Phase 1a."

"What about the overflow from number six?" asks the assistant.

"Let's spread half into the first five and reserve the remaining half until September for any surprises."

"Yes, sir. That was my thought, too," agrees Tom.

The rancher executive turns to his computer keyboard and briskly composes a short 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, 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 to triumph, it will take generations to roll back. And the great battles will not be political, but moral, intellectual, and spiritual. For the adversary is not another party, but another faith, another way of seeing God and man.

Needed for victory is not only a conservative spirit, to defend what is right about America and the West, but a counterrevolutionary spirit to recapture lost ground. To preserve their rights, and their right to live as they wished, the Founding Fathers had to become rebels. So shall we.
(at 230)

If raw sewage is being dumped in the reservoir, buy bottled water. The rule applies to a polluted culture.
(at 250)

— Pat Buchanan,
The Death of the West

...
[T]
he state is best resisted by ignoring it and refusing its offers and assistance and, since the state seeks to isolate, by forging voluntary social relationships with one another to provide for our mutual needs and wants. A good and so far successful example of this is the growth of home-schooling.

— Jeffery Snyder, Interview by Carlo Stagnaro, 2/8/2001
www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/stagnaro2.html

The homeschooling movement increases by 20% per year as parents frantically rescue their children (and possibly America's future) from the government indoctrination camps. The NEA further pressures Congress to co-opt the remaining private schools under the federal net, as well as restrict homeschooling to virtual extinction. Counterpressure increases to pass some sort of voucher program to relieve alternatively schooled families from the outrageous tax burden of also supporting government schools.

A dramatic increase of criticism of the "religious right" sweeps America. Liberals castigate Christians for their "repressive beliefs."

Liberals call right-wingers "hatemongers" and conservative dialogue "hate speech." In this sense, liberals remind me of this perennially flatulent guy in my high school who was always demanding, "Who
farted
?!" It is the liberals who are consumed by hate; hate for all that is good, simple, pure, and decent. Conservatives generally just want to be left alone to live their own lives, and liberals quite literally hate them for it.

— James Wayne Preston,
Journals

Illegal aliens from Mexico are increasingly diagnosed with the El Tor strain of
Vibrio cholerae
. They appreciate the free medical treatment given them in the Southwest USA.

Cheyenne, Wyoming

October 2006

Wyoming Department of Administration and Information Division of Economic Analysis, Emerson Building

"Huh! Now,
this
is odd," observes a data analyst.

"What's odd?" asks his colleague friend in the adjoining cubicle.

"These new resident numbers. Five counties show increases of 21%." The analysts work for the Wyoming State Data Center (WSDC) which publishes a monthly bulletin of economic conditions, housing figures, sales tax collections, cost of living indices, etc. Their second floor cubicles have a view of northern Cheyenne. It is a slate and pewter autumn day. An early storm is creeping in.

"21%? Which five counties?"

"Niobrara, Hot Springs, Johnson, Crook, and Sublette."

"Not Teton or Albany?"

"Nope, five economically mediocre counties with very low population bases and — hey, wait a minute!"

"What now?"

"They're not just sparsely populated, they're the five
least
populated counties!
That
can't be coincidence!"

"
Hmmm
. That
is
weird! Hot Springs has Thermop, Johnson has Buffalo, Crook has Sundance, and Sublette has Pinedale — and those are all nice little towns, but who the hell would move to
Lusk
? It's a tumbleweed gas stop on the way to nowhere."

"You got that right."

"Intrastate relocation?"

"Hold on, I'm accessing migration flows. Nope, very few intrastate movers. Most came from . . . California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, and Texas."

"That's strange. California and Colorado are typical, but we always
lose
people to Oregon, Arizona, and Texas. This makes no sense. Besides the oil boom in the early 1980s, when did we ever have a net inflow from
Texas
? What the hell is going on?"