🚀 go-pugleaf

denning@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu writes:
>Two examples of cases where tapping saved lives:  In one case, the FBI
>prevented a terrorist group from shooting down a commercial airliner
>with a stolen military weapons system.  In another, they prevented
>a porno-ring from kidnaping a 12-year old.  The ring planned to murder
>him while making (and then selling) a film about it.  In that case, they 
>intercepted voice, fax, and conversations over a BBS.  

	Oh, so if they had done their scheming via the US mail, it
would have been OK and protected? Or is the US mail the next thing
to go?

	Look - it's *easy* to point at examples where legalized
wiretapping will help. But that completely ignores the fact that it
only solves a VERY SMALL PART of the problem. Making cryptography
harder to use is *NOT* going to win the war on drugs. It's not even
going to help a lot. It may help in a few isolated cases in which
you catch a few of the more stupid criminals. You can then trumpet
those cases as examples of how many lives you've saved, but at the
same time, you've threatened the underpinnings of our society.

	Drastic measures like institutionalizing national wiretapping
might be justifiable in the face of a truly horrendous threat, if it
would help. You have to be able to make a strong case that it'll
SOLVE the problem, not just catch a few small fry, before you can
justify it.

	I submit to you that the availability of DES and PGP sources
from outside the USA, and the way in which crypto-code is readily
available on the net, are *PROOF* of how useless your proposal is.

	I admire your efforts to make our country a better place to
be. Most of us are in favor of that. We just think that you are
proposing a drastic (and visible - is that it?) step that will not
show significant benefit, and will cost us a great deal of that
intangible we call "freedom."

	In a time when our duly elected leaders are using our own
CIA (and its excellent communications channels) to funnel weapons and
funds to third world dictators, doesn't it strike you as vaguely stupid
to worry about catching the very few criminals who will actually comply
with your proposal? If anyone needs to be registering their keys with
a trustable source for audit - it's not us.

mjr.
-- 
	You can't fix stupidity with software.
						-notebooks of a heretic