🚀 go-pugleaf

unruh@physics.ubc.ca (William Unruh) writes:

>For those of us outside the USofA these analogies make us wonder whether
>such registration is not a good thing. If crypt really is like guns,
>whose only use is to kill lots of innocent people it seems, then maybe
>crypt were better strictly controlled. Ie, your arguement would be
>stronger if you limited yourself to the uses and abuses of cryptography
>and didn't engage in the silly American penchant for seeing yourselves oa
>as lone cowboys out to right wrongs no matter how many people get killed
>in the crossfire.

Well, don't worry.  We silly Americans tend to see the role of government
much differently from people in other countries.  If you really, honestly,
believe that it is the government's responsibility to protect your family
at all times and under all circumstances, then you are doomed to suffer the
fate that inevitably follows giving a government the power that must
accompany that kind of responsibility.

By the way, the whole idea of having an armed citizenry is that the guns
should never NEED to be used... the fact that people have them and are
willing to use them to protect their liberty is enough.


>When people today cry out "Give me liberty or give me death" I'm tempted
>to say, fine, go away and die, only please do it quietly, and don't haul
>down a whole bunch of innocents with you.

Well, about 200 years ago most of the people (to the south of you) all said
those exact words, and they didn't quite all die.  It seems they even built
the most powerful country in the world.  Have you ever read Thomas Paine?
Do you realize how irresponsible the "Peace in our time" position is?  You
do whatever you can to appease the government to prevent conflict, and then
let your children and grandchildren suffer the consequences.  Not nice.


>[Note for those of you unable to see through sarcasm, I do not think
>that cryptography and guns have any similarity at all. I see no problem
>with the government trying to regulate our lives for the common good
>(and yes that is hard to discerne at times and that is why we have open
>political processes so the arguements can be advanced and experiments
>tried and thrown out if they don't work) I doubt greatly that any
>attempt to regulate cryptography in the manner suggested would work, and
>as such the impassioned debate sounds about as pointless as it would be
>against a govenment attempt to legislate pi to be 3.000]

And what are you going to do when the government decides that it doesn't
want to throw out the current "experiment?"  If you have already given
the government the means to control the population and monitor all flow
of information (and, of course, the population is totally disarmed), well,
you're stuck.  And please, don't say "It can't happen here."  (See the
book by Sinclair Lewis with the same title.)


>In a parallel vein, secure telecommunications ( eg cellular phones) will
>probably come about when the govenment realises that without such
>security their own communications are open. This has happened twice here
>in Canada- once here in BC and more recently in Quebec, where radio and
>cellular calls between govt officials caused huge scandals (and see also
>the Princess Di affair in the UK). Not every rampart is worth defending
>to the death especially when the attacker is liable to destroy himself
>in attacking a crumbling one anyway.

In this I hope you are right.  But, as pointed out earlier in this group,
what WE get to use for encryption and what THE GOVERNMENT gets to use may
be quite different.  If the people let this happen, then they must expect
the government to notice that is has been given the power (and the "right")
to monitor all communications between its citizens, while keeping its own
communications secret.  Power corrupts.  And if you don't believe that,
then you're in trouble.

-- 
Michael T. Palmer, M/S 152, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA 23681
Voice: 804-864-2044,   FAX: 804-864-7793,   Email: m.t.palmer@larc.nasa.gov