NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/sci/crypt/4861

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-16 | 6.4 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!rutgers!igor.rutgers.edu!zodiac.rutgers.edu!leichter
From: [e-mail]
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: Bill of Rights
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 16 Nov 92 14:59:01 GMT
References: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: Rutgers University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 103
Nntp-Posting-Host: cancer.rutgers.edu

In article <[e-mail]>,
[e-mail] writes:
|  [I had written]
||.....strong cryptography changes the whole game:
||From the relatively small amount
||of information most individuals can hold entirely in their memories,
||we are suddenly in a world where essentially unlimited amounts of
||information can be protected.  This changes the basis on which we made
||the original social tradeoff - every bit as much as more powerful
| weapons
||change the basis of whatever social tradeoff you believe is implied by
||the Second Amendment.
|
| Perhaps it does, but the fact remains that the change is fundamental,
| technological, and economic.  "All the king's horses and all the king's
| men," all of the legislation in the world cannot undo it.  If the
| proposed laws could make pi equal to three, then there would be some
| point to discussing the convenience that would result.

Others have stated this as "if cryptography were outlawed, only outlaws would
use cryptography".  Sounds great - not as good as the original NRA phrase,
but not bad.  But let's substitute some other phrases and see how it works.
"If murder is outlawed, only outlaws will commit murder".  Well, that's true -
but what does it tell us about laws against murder?  Hmm, that looks at
ACTIONS, rather than THINGS.  How about "If cars that pollute the atmosphere
are outlawed, only outlaws will drive such cars."  Does this imply that any
law that attempts to outlaw a THING is wrong?  Or cut it the other way:  "If
firing guns is outlawed, only outlaws will fire guns".  Now it's not a thing
but an action - happy with that?

Bill, I know you aren't slinging slogans the way too many others in this group
do - as a substitute for thought.  (Actually, you don't sling them at all.)
There's an underlying belief at work here, a kind of technological imperative:
If something CAN be done at all, it will become pervasive, and society just
has to accept that.  I don't believe that's true.  Certain technologies may be
difficult to control, but that doesn't mean we are forbidden to try.  As with
any other social action, we have to consider the trade-offs.

Yes, it's true that anyone with a PC can use it to do encryption.  However,
the potential for really wide-spread use of cryptography depends on a large-
scale infrastructure.  For example, nothing I do on my PC lets me send
messages thought the phone network that are anonymous:  They can always be
traced down to the pair running to my house.  (Yes, people can fudge telco
records.  So what?  All kinds of evidence can be fabricated, destroyed,
changed - that's always been true.  It hasn't stopped us from using evidence.)
Techniques for attaining true anonymity - mixes, anonymous forwarders, and
such - have been proposed and even implemented.  But they have to exist on
a fairly large scale, in public, to be useful - which makes it technologically
possible to regulate them.

The fact that something is hard is not an argument against trying it.  That
fact that something is IMPOSSIBLE would be - as Burke said, the first moral
imperative is to make sense.  I am not convinced that cryptography presents
an inherently impossible problem of regulation.

|
| Please permit the injection of personal opinion:
|
| Whatever you may believe about the Second Amendment, I do not believe
| that the Fifth Amendment represented a "trade off."  The founders were
| not far removed from a time in which people were burned at the stake on
| no more evidence than their own testimony elicited under torture.  They
| understood the potential for abuse of government power that only a few
| in this time and place can appreciate.  I believe that the Fifth Amendment
| represented a fundamental and unequivocal choice to tolerate any
| individual behavior rather than to tempt the state to torture.
|
I don't disagree with most of what you say.  However, even here there was a
tradeoff.  The Fifth Amendment protects you from SELF incrimination.  It does
not protect you from compelled testimony against your parents or children.
Many people would be more likely to testify against themselves then against
their children!  The courts and legislators hav found or created protections
against clergy testifying as to what was told to them, against spouses
testifying against each other, against reporters testifying about their
sources.  None of these protections are explicit in the Constitution; they
represent the evolution in our thinking on these issues.  (And that evolution,
as I've mentioned in other postings, is not always toward more immunities!
The protections of spouses from testifying against each other are now viewed
as a bad idea, and most have been removed.)

I don't believe there were many absolutists among the drafters.  They had a
vision, but they were also practical men.  By listing rights that would
inevitably conflict, they necessarily created a system of tradeoffs,

| The "magic words," as Jyrrki calls them, have changed.  We can no longer
| be manipulated by the fear of witchcraft, heresy, treason, or Communism.
| But the current ones are no less potent.  Those that appeal for more and
| more powerful government in their name are no more enlightened than those
| who burned the witches and heretics.  Those that suggest that we are
| only being asked to surrender a little freedom had better be careful what
| they ask for, they might get it.

On the other hand, those who close their eyes to threats may not be happy
with what they get either.  While cries of the Communist threat were by and
large manipulation of fear, the threat at some level was quite real.  Just
ask anyone who lives in Eastern Europe.  At one time in this country, anyone
who spoke out against Stalin was criticised as a fear-monger who just did not
understand that Stalin was creating a worker's paradise.  That propaganda was
every bit as false and pernicious as a later era's propaganda against "Reds".

What's needed - and is so difficult to attain - is balance.

                            -- Jerry