[10837] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: (hypothetical) mandatory Clipper Chips
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roger Bohn)
Fri Mar 11 21:34:21 1994
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 1994 14:20:35 -0800
To: francis@avalle.insoft.com (John [Francis] Stracke), com-priv@psi.com
From: Rbohn@ucsd.edu (Roger Bohn)
At 10:10 AM 3/11/94 +0500, John [Francis] Stracke wrote:
>I just thought of something--if the govt. were to ban the use of non-
>Clipper encryption, wouldn't people like PKP be able to sue on the
>grounds that the govt. was devaluing their property (the public key
>patents)? The Supreme Court ruled a couple of years ago that a law
....
Many states have laws forbidding the use of radar detectors. To the
computer phobic law agency (and legislator), a law against uncrackable
encryption is in the same category.
The U.S. government can, and does, restrict your actions. That's one of
their purposes. Sometimes we like it; sometimes we don't. (E.g. various
views of pollution controls; laws against murder.) That's politics.
As Meeks keeps telling us, this is shaping up to be a big lobbying effort:
the good guys versus the national security apparatus (including FBI, NSA;
local police forces have better things to worry about, I guess). It's hard
to believe they are serious since the law enforcement value is so minimal,
but stranger things have happened.
