🚀 go-pugleaf

rrb@corona.CSS.GOV (Robert Blandford) writes:
>I feel that I must defend Dorothy Denning's proposal.
>
>Let us suppose that her recommendations were put into practice.  How
>would the resulting state of liberty compare to that of a few years
>ago; or even to the state for almost everyone today?
>
>My answer is that we would have increased liberty with her recommendations
>in effect.  
>
>Today any person can buy equipment to tap your communications.  Quasi-
>-government organizations like the watergate burglars, who could not 
>have obtained a warrant, can tap your communications.  Law enforcement
>people who are looking for evidence to use to get a warrant can tap
>your communications.  All of this monitoring would cease.

This is foolish. No one can tap my communications for the most part
now -- I use encryption on them already. When I get a secure
telephone, I'll start using it, too. You seem to be advancing the
preposterous notion that without the government registering our keys
we will somehow be unable to use cryptography. People are starting to
use it right now without having to register their keys, and will use
it more and more in coming years.

>It is true that absolute privacy would be denied.  However, I think
>that encryption, like guns, are very highly overrated as protectors
>of liberty.  The true protections are free speech, free press, freedom
>of assembly, free elections, and the exercise thereof by the
>citizens.

What makes you think that without guns we would have had any of these
protections in the first place? What won the revolutionary war?
Spitballs? The reason for the second amendment of the constitution was
so that polititians would live in perpetual fear of being killed by
the citizenry. I am neither joking here nor exagerating. As for
cryptography, what makes you think we can trust our government so much
that its worth letting them know every move we make? History has shown
that freedom is won with blood, and then given up by fools without a
fight in the name of the public safety. If we give up all protection,
we are defenseless against a military coup or worse. Thats why people
maintain protection and privacy -- so that we can never have a
dictatorship.

Furthermore, there are good reasons to want defense against the
government RIGHT NOW. I'm a political activist. I do not care to
permit a corrupt and already largely destructive government such as
ours to read my messages with impunity. I don't care about
prosecution. I'm far more worried about having the political
opposition reading my messages, or, worse, using their contents to
arrange to have me bumped off. I love the United States, but I live in
fear of its government, and I will not cooperate with my own
enslavement by said government.



--
Perry Metzger		pmetzger@shearson.com
--
"They can have my RSA key when they pry it from my cold dead fingers."
Libertarian Party info: Phone 1-800-682-1776, E-Mail 345-5647@mcimail.com