Lucky Green wrote about banning lapdancing on the Senate floor: Banning laptops continues a long tradition of congressional resistance to technology, the Senate moreso than the House. The Architect of the Capitol, an office as well as a person, has to deal with a heritage of Luddites who have resisted, as examples, removal of cuspidors; installing women's facilities of all sorts: putting in air-conditioning (mechanical ventilation as well as cooling), electric lights, subterranean trams, elevators, smoke alarms, telephones!, telegraphs, electro-mechanical quorum and roll calls (bells, lights and pagers!), wheelchairs (just recently), and more -- virtually every invention has been delayed in the Capitol, along with compliance with the laws imposed on the country but not on hallowed halls. Ex-AoCs sometimes leak the stupifying arguments the solons make for maintaining their supposedly superior lifestyles free of demanding gadgetry and popular fad: their preference is for human servants over devices in order to maintian deniability, for while flesh and blood is what the beasts know best how to cajole, seduce and terrorize it is also the reason they remain ever ready for betrayal and opportunistic one-night-stand switching of lifetime fidelity. Blinking, recording, error-archiving, machines scare the shit out of the the fork-tongue power-aphrodisiacal nymphomaniacs, not to say that the rest of us would act so differently given a seat in inner circles of jerks getting lapdanced on a magic carpet -- who wants that in the National Archives of Perfidy? Often the reason folks oppose new technology is that it threatens their network of operations based on old technology, as the case with encryption. Still, it's worth considering what leaked Senate plaintext (gov, pol, illicit) would induce the secrecy-obsessed senators to support strong crypto for their own privacy of stashed wealth and squelched Paulas? Often new technology is resisted because that it threatens networks of successful operations of barely legal scams based on old technology, as the case with encryption, tv, radio, telephone, telegraph, printing, highways, roads, trails, stars, evil eyes, body stench, intuition, fear, mother's milk, amniotic warmth, egg and dart, downhole non-existence. To be sure, there are disclosures of red-faced liaisons, the sort recorded in hallowed halls and red-flocked boudoirs, that the TLAs (mirroring the KGB) may be threatening Congress with, in the eye-opening publications of Kalliste. See: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/