🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov4.191531.17572@spider.co.uk> paulq@spider.co.uk (Paul Qualtrough) writes:
   >This seems to ignore constitutional issues, like forcing a person to
   >testify against himself,
   What?!?!  Has the land of truth, justice and cotton fields done away with
   the standard swearing-in phrase of "...the truth, the _whole_ truth, and
   nothing but the truth" which, if agreed to, implies that you must testify
   "against yourself" if some part of the truth is incriminating?

The right not to be forced to testify against yourself has been part
of our Bill of Rights since it was first adopted, and the
interpretations of it have been much stronger since the early-1960s
Supreme Court rulings that prevent prosecutors from using illegally
obtained evidence, such as confessions obtained by beating.

Other parts of the Fifth Amendment have been substantially weakened,
like the right not to have your life, liberty, or property taken
without due process of law, but the self-incrimination part is pretty strong.
The main workaround is to compel you to testify under a grant of immunity,
or to have the prosecutor and judge tell the jury that since you
wouldn't confess you must be hiding something and therefore guilty, ....

   The companies who supply the "net" may well be within their rights to only
   forward messages which comply to certain rules, and if the goverment dictates
   that one of those rules is that "no encrypted message shall pass without
   a registered assault key" then is there really any constitutional comeback

So far, the rules for "common carriers" say that they're not liable
for the contents of the information they carry (e.g. phone conversations),
though that may be covered by the Drug Exception to the Bill Of Rights.
However, assuming that they don't verify every message before
transmitting it, which would be nearly impossible, and that they at
most use simpleminded checking to detect encrypted traffic, no problem.
It's easy to make encrypted messages look like unencrypted binary data,
enough to fool a medium-quality artificial intelligence,
and if the "suspiciousness detector" is set too high, you reject too
many valid messages.

   "once a bad law is passed, it is virtually never repealed."
That's one reason we're all arguing so rabidly with Dr. Denning,
especially since she's been one of Us rather than one of Them.
--
#				Pray for peace;      Bill
# Bill Stewart 908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.att.com AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ
# Nov 12 - Anniversary of Indonesian massacre in East Timor, 1991
# Indonesia first invaded in 1975, and about 1/3 of the people have been killed.