[118527] in Cypherpunks
Re: AUCRYPTO: On oldy encryptions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Kelly)
Thu Sep 30 23:22:59 1999
From: Sean Kelly <sean.k@mindspring.com>
In-Reply-To: <199909301932.PAA23632@cti06.citenet.net>
Message-ID: <000355c8fb3daf3a_mailit@mail.bellatlantic.net>
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 22:57:07 -0400
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Cc: aucrypto@suburbia.net, mok-kong.shen@t-online.de, jf_avon@citenet.net
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Reply-To: Sean Kelly <sean.k@mindspring.com>
>On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 20:11:24 +0200, Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
>
>>As to the minority of crimials hiving high IQ, what
>>hinders them from using quadruple or quintuple AES, despite
>>Wassenaar and other regulations that for some plain or secret
>>reasons are reportedly going to be relaxed?
>
>
>You are just echoing my post of a few days on Cypherpunks. Thus, I conclude
>that the true goal of theses laws (including gun control, currency control,
>drug laws) are not at all aimed at protecting the people but at controlling
them.
>
>My conclusion does not come out of some pet big-conspiracy-theory but out of
>the simple observation of what *exact* effects of such laws.
>
>All over the world, the govt are lying through their teeth to their
>populations, and all over the world, they cash in on the lies.
>It is a hypnotism manoeuvre to keep the sheep under control.
While part of me wants to agree with you, the other part thinks that it's
just as likely that the government is just filled with control-oriented,
shortsighted people who strike at the simplest and most obvious solution to
an immediate problem without considering either the side-effects or whether
or not the idea will actually work.
The US gov't is a policy-oriented gov't. They make a policy against crypto
because they are afraid they won't be able to protect the citizens from evil
if they can't ferret it out before something bad happens. The reality ends
up being that the public is enslaved and the criminals go on using crypto,
but that's not the point. The point is that the government has said that
"crypto is bad for these reasons, thus we do not support the civilian use of
crypto." It's not THEIR fault the criminals didn't listen, they were TRYING
to protect us. Their reasoning was sound. They would be better equipped to
stop crimes before they happened if no one used crypto and they monitored
everyone indiscriminately.
We tend to like a short easy solution to all our problems and an easy
explanation for everything. So much so that we make ignorant laws towards
this end and make up false explanations for what went wrong so we can sleep
soundly at night, knowing the perceived threat (which is often also fiction)
is taken care of.
Is the fear-mongering of the government and the media a conscious effort to
control the public or is it merely fickle stupid humanity struggling to
grapple with the rigors of daily life? It's probably a combination of both,
but as much the latter as the former. As many people fight for the downfall
of this and the restriction of that our of well-meaning stupidity as out of a
desire to gain power over their peers.
Consider the "war against drugs." The vocal civilian supporters tend to be
either mothers who had children that died from overdoses or addicts whose
lives were destroyed by drugs. In both cases, they feel that they are
somehow doing society a favor by ridding it of this scourge because everyone
else out there is at as much risk as they were (and look what happened to
them).
The US government feels, probably more than any other, that it has to save
the people from themselves. This is probably because of the structure of the
legal system in this country. If I trip and fall from a crack in a sidewalk,
I can sue the town for not maintaining that sidewalk (and win the case).
Suddenly, every stupid accident that should be brushed under the rug becomes
a multimillion dollar issue. The mentality after a while is that if the
lawmakers can make doing all those stupid things illegal then they will
reduce the number of lawsuits in the country and in a sense be keeping the
people safer than they had been before. Many people are dumb enough to
beleive that they actually ARE safer than they were before (or they just
don't care one way or the other) and the circle continues.
Crypto is a separate, but related issue. It seems that the mentality
regarding crypto is the same one that has existed since things really got
heated back in WW2. The only way to keep the country safe was to know what
the enemy was talking about. The war ended, crypto became a part of
communication between civilians, and suddenly the civilians were the enemy.
If they're whispering then they must be up to no good. Old habits die hard.
To return to my original point, you said that "the true goal of theses laws
(including gun control, currency control, drug laws) [is] not at all aimed at
protecting the people but at controlling them." I am saying that the true
goal of these laws (misguided though it may be) is aimed at protecting the
people BY controlling them. Lock someone in a cell and you can be sure that
they're pretty safe. The question is, at one point is the tradeoff no longer
worth it.
Sean
"No one ever ASKED me if I wanted to be protected from that"
