🚀 go-pugleaf

This is important enough that this kind of nonsense neds to be refuted by as
many people as possible, so:

In article <unruh.720338918@physics.ubc.ca> unruh@physics.ubc.ca (William Unruh) writes:
}tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) writes:
}
}
}>Registering "Assault Keys" -- How the Proposal to Register Encryption
}>Keys Has Ominous Parallels to Gun Control
}
}
}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.

Those of you outside the USA (especially in the worker's paradise of Canada)
have a great interest in freedom of communication, which means the absense
of statist intervention in cryptography, among other things.  Surely if we
had freer and open communications it would be less possible to excuse your
prejudices against guns and cowboys by attributing it to ignorance and we'd
be more able to dispose of such claims by attributing them to blatant bigotry!

}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.
}
}[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

This is your fundamental error.  If government regulation of our lives for the
common good worked and was moral, the Canadian government wouldn't have to
regulate out of existence private hospitals.  This was done, in the words of
an anonymous official of the part of the Canadian government in charge of its
socialized medicine, "Because we will not brook superior competition," but I
paraphrase.  The Soviet Union would have prospered, not collapsed, and no
one would be rejecting socialism in Argentina, Estonia, Latvia, the Czech
Republic, Poland, former East Germany, etc.


Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! - Think Universally, Act Selfishly
starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu

"True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten
oneself and others." - Voltaire