🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct29.020013.5458@shearson.com>, pmetzger@snark.shearson.com
(Perry E. Metzger) writes in response to an earlier message of mine:
|    AMENDMENT I
| 
|    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
|    or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
|    speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
|    assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of
|    grievances.
| 
| As extended by the 14th Amendment, this means that no government body
| in the country may restrict what we can say.

This is reasoning on the order of a fourth grader's "It's a free country."

Let me propose a simple experiment for you to try.  Walk into your local
bank, wait in line for a teller, smile into the camera and say the following
words:  "This is a stickup.  Put all your money in a bag and hand it to me."
When you are later arrested, defend yourself by quoting your interpretation
of the 1st and 14th Amendments.  Report back to us with the results.

|					       That means that if I
| choose to say a group of numbers that happen to be in code, the
| government has no right to stop me.

You can use any name you like.  If you use a name for fradulent purposes,
you will be appropriately charged.  Once again:  Try it, and report back to
us how your "free speech" defense is treated by the courts.

Or, try selling pond water as a cure for cancer.  Hell, just free speech,
right?  Again, report back on the results.

[Irrelevant stuff about obscenity omitted.]

|    AMENDMENT IX
| 
|    The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not
|    be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
| 
| This means, Mr. Leichter, that the mere fact that you find no right to
| privacy in the constitution does not mean that we have no
| constitutional right to privacy. The ninth amendment means that the
| mere fact that the framers could not enumerate every possible
| disgusting horrible invasion that the engineers of government might
| devise some day does not mean that we have no protection against said
| machinations.

I claim the right to shoot anyone who disagrees with me on the net.  I
challenge you to find me anything in the Constitution that allows the
government to interfere in my sacred Right of Revenge.

(For those who willing to think rather than dream, the government's
right to enforce bans against murder and other nasty things are implicit
in what's known as the "police power" of government.  That power allows
the government to draft a very wide variety of laws "for the public
welfare".  Laws controlling encryption would clearly be authorized under
the police power; whether they would stand up against various explicit
limitations on government power is another question.)

| 
|    AMENDMENT X
| 
|    The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
|    nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States
|    respectively, or to the people.
| 
| This means that since the US Government was not explicitly granted the
| right under the constitution to compel people to divulge their secret
| keys that the government has no such right. This amendment has been
| ignored since FDR threatened to destroy the supreme court following
| the overturning of numerous bits of new deal legislation because they
| were blatently unconstitutional. However, the mere fact that it is
| ignored does not make it less a part of our constitution.

The dreamer's view of the constitution.  I hate to break the news to you,
but ever since Marbury vs. Madison (which established judicial review over
Congressional law-making - something else that is nowhere to be found in
the text of the Constitution, but a major basis of the unique protections
of the American legal system) the Constitution has meant what the Supreme
Court has said it meant.  You are welcome to pursue the small band of
people out at the margin who agree with you about FDR and the Court since
his time.  Say hello to (non-Justice) Bork while you are out there - you'll
find he agrees with you on basic philosophy - and he'll show you what the
real consequences of such a judicial philosophy really are.

[Arguments about obligations to aid in prosecution omitted as this is long
enough as it is, and I've already answered some of them.]

||Try getting caught with duplicate sets of books some time.  You WILL reveal
||your income to the government so that it can adequately determine the taxes
||you owe.  You WILL provide enough information about your sources of income
||to satisfy the government.  Don't like it?  Afraid that revealing this much
||would give away criminal behavior on your part?  Or because you just think
||that it's your private business?  Well, that's really too bad for you.
| 
| Actually, the precedents surrounding the tax protestor Irwin Schiff
| seem pretty conclusive that you are under no obligation to testify as
| to your income -- but that if you don't tell them, they can assess you
| for any amount that they think is reasonable and you are then
| obligated to prove that they are wrong. The government cannot compell
| testimony from people against themselves.  Its an ancient and accepted
| part of the common law traditions on which our nation was founded and
| it is enshrined in our constitution.

Fine.  Let's apply the same precedent to cryptography:  If you refuse to
reveal your key, the government may make any reasonable claim about what
the cleartext is.  It is then your obligation to prove that the cleartext
is something different.  Would that make you happy?

							-- Jerry