[118538] in Cypherpunks
Re: AUCRYPTO: On oldy encryptions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jean-Francois Avon)
Fri Oct 1 13:13:53 1999
Message-Id: <199910011647.MAA26073@cti06.citenet.net>
From: "Jean-Francois Avon" <jf_avon@citenet.net>
To: "Cypherpunks" <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Date: Fri, 01 Oct 1999 12:01:03 -0700
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Reply-To: "Jean-Francois Avon" <jf_avon@citenet.net>
On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 22:57:07 -0400, Sean Kelly wrote:
>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 govt is NOT there to protect the public. It was stated in Supreme Court
(don't ask me the references, I forgot them).
>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.
Are they? You must assume then that they are dumb.
>Their reasoning was sound.
On what basis? Not on any Reality-based observable fact...
>They would be better equipped to
>stop crimes before they happened if no one used crypto and they monitored
>everyone indiscriminately.
So they said about guns. But you assume that the people within the govt are
not harboring any evil intentions. Isn't it a bit unrealistic to assume that
100% of the civil servant are honest?
>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.
I agree.
>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.
I agree with your statistical presentation. But at the dynamic level, not all
proponents have the same influence, therefore a 50-50 ration doesn't mean that
a status-quo happens.
>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).
Yeah, but the law of unintended consequences applies here. They do so at the
expense of some basic rights and principles and expect to be able to get away
with it. But Reality is NOT optional.
>The US government feels, probably more than any other, that it has to save
>the people from themselves.
While they might "feel" that, they certainly don't "do" it. Observation
doesn'T warrant that conclusion.
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 bet you have NO idea of how the legal system is structured. I bet you are
not aware that there are TWO differents governemnts on the soil of the
continental US, and that both act independently (but have the same members).
The "United States" is one and "The United States of America" is the second.
One is a Common Law republic, the other one is a federal democracy.
(I'm not remembering the exact terminology here, unfortunately)
>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.
Isn't a bit over-patronizing? :-)
>"No one ever ASKED me if I wanted to be protected from that"
EXACTLY!
Ciao
jfa
