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Q: Will we see a relationship between the characters in CRYPTONOMICON and Quicksilver? A: There are familial connections between the 2 books. Q: This is the book you are writing with a fountain pen.

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Q: Will we see a relationship between the characters in CRYPTONOMICON and Quicksilver? A: There are familial connections between the 2 books. Q: This is the book you are writing with a fountain pen. A: I’ve written every word of... See more » Q: Will we see a relationship between the characters in CRYPTONOMICON and Quicksilver? A: There are familial connections between the 2 books. Q: This is the book you are writing with a fountain pen. A: I’ve written every word of it so far with fountain pen on paper. Part of the theory was that it would make me less long-winded, but it hasn’t actually worked. I think it has improved the quality of the actual work somewhat, simply because it is actually easier to edit something on paper than on screen. So usually every page of the original manuscript has been gone over 2 or 3 times before it goes into the computer and then when I type it into the computer that’s another pass again where I can make changes if I want to. Q: What about the future of Crypto? A: We’re in a strange moment right now where everyone who uses the internet seems to be cognoscente at some level that it has its weaknesses from a security standpoint. So if you sit down and talk to most people who use e-mail they are aware at some level that their e-mail really isn’t private. Everyone hears about crackers breaking into systems all the time. Everyone who uses a cell phone must understand at some level that it’s a radio, a walkie-talkie, and every word they say is being broadcast in a way that anyone with a scanner could pick it up and listen to it. People know these things but nobody acts on it, which I find kind of interesting. Historically there is not a lot of actual spying on people’s email that goes on. It happens, but it doesn’t seem to be causing serious problems for very many people. The same is kind of true for cell phones. An engineer would look at our communications system today--email, cell phones--and be horrified at all the security gaps and predict that the bad people would exploit those gaps on a massive scale and a huge market for crypto would spring out of it, but it hasn’t happened. Maybe it will. Most people living in a society seem to put certain limits on what they will and won’t do. This is a hard thing for scientists and engineers to understand, but it seems to be very true. So the theoretical market that should be there for crypto doesn’t appear to be materialized. I think crypto will slowly percolate its way up and people will adopt it gradually as user friendly, cheap products, become available. But there doesn’t seem to be any strong public interest in this now. Q: I think its because a good deal of Americans have a faith in their privacy. A: There is a product out now called Freedom, from Zero Knowledge, that works with your existing web browser to give you privacy wile surfing the internet. It has the advantage that it’s transparent. You don’t have to do anything. It processes all interactions with the web in such a way to give you privacy and anonymity. I’ll be interested to see whether the general public sees a need for it. Q: Isn’t the biggest invasion of privacy happening now conducted by companies targeting consumers on the web via their surfing habits? A:I gave a talk a week ago at a conference on Computers Freedom and Privacy which was a little bit about this. The threat model for crypto people/ privacy people, has always been big brother and this feeling that the NSA would get access to all this information and set up a totalitarian system and what we’re finding in practice is that big brother does not appear to be a threat. There are potential threats everywhere. If you went out and took a global census of everyone who was getting screwed, ripped off, reamed in one way or another, you would find that the bad guy in each case was different. It would be the local police department, or a company that is giving a man a hard time, a local branch of government, a family gone bad, a business institution, there all sorts of powers out there with the potential to turn into bad guys and press someone, but what we don’t ever see is all these things coalescing into a global big brother. So the situation is much more murky, nuanced and complicated. Q: Do you relate to any of your characters? A: Not particularly. There aren’t that many points in common between us. Writing different characters is not autobiography. It is not an attempt to put oneself in the pages of a book. It’s about trying to see the world from the point of view of someone who may be extremely different than you. That’s a common trait of novelist: to have that ability to see things from just about anyone’s points of view which often makes them seem sort of pusillanimous. Novelists, for example, tend not to take sides in arguments very readily, as a necessity of what they do for a living they can listen to all sides of an argument and agree with all sides. That’s what we do and people are frequently surprised by just how little I have in common with a good many characters in my books. Q: How does the writing process work for you? A: A good deal of the work that I do takes place in the background, which is a computer-ese way of putting it. It is a process that runs quietly at an unconscious level while I am doing other things and that goes on 24 hours a day. The actual putting of words on paper might come out to 2-3 hours a day. I’ve found that from long experience that the best way to facilitate that process is to do that 2-3 hours of putting words on paper then stop and do something as completely different from writing as I possibly can. Specifically, to get it off my conscious mind. That can be just about anything. For me, what works is doing something of a practical nature. Playing around with technology is a convenient choice because I know how to do it and I can get the stuff I need pretty easily. Anything to get the hands busy and take the mind off the actual work in progress. See less »

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privacy, web surfing, zero knowledge

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Q: Will we see a relationship between the characters in CRYPTONOMICON and Quicksilver? A: There are familial connections between the 2 books. Q: This is the book you are writing with a fountain pen.

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