Tim writes:
With egg all over their face on Clipper, I see the Administration now launching a new campaign, a campaign being led by Donn Parker, Dorothy Denning, Andy Grove, and others. In this campaign, the second approach mentioned above will be dominant: a focus on pedophiles who "encrypt their list of victims," a focus on "terrorists who form virtual networks around the world," and a focus on "money launderers who use crypto anarchy to spread their poison."
This is beginning already. I haven't seen anything in the mainstream press lately on Cyberspace in which the word "pedophile" wasn't mentioned prominently. The enemy learned long ago that you can get the public up in arms about almost anything, as long as you package it as either a public safety or child protection issue. I don't think we have very much time left to save our precious encryption rights from Big Brother. Revoking rights is like frog boiling. As long as it is done slowly enough, it goes relatively unnoticed. Bill Clinton was talking yesterday about how no one complains any more about tight airport security and accepts it as a fact of life. Contrast this with the screams of outrage from the first few people forced to walk through metal detectors and have their baggage searched. Remember when civil forfeiture started? First only profits from illegal activities were seized. They quickly moved to seizing all of a suspects assets. Now cops can stop you on the road, empty your pockets, and take your money using only the justification that possession of more than a certain amount is evidence of wrongdoing. Look at the engineering of public attitudes on marijuana, underage erotica, and even smoking that have taken place over the last decade. Pretty soon the public will accept the notion that they must give up all their personal privacy in order to protect us from terrorists, drug dealers, and people with rarified sexual interests. Only incompetent opposing points of view on this issue are ever presented by the mainstream media. Give these people another year or two, and they will be telling us that mere possession of PGP abuses children in some ficticious and vicarious manner. Because the government is so powerful, and we are not, we have to avoid the pitfall of harping frivilous issues in a last desperate attempt to thwart the federal agenda. Attacks on Denning's character, the Clipper algorithm, and the LEAF field, while interesting, do nothing to help our cause. What will we do when the government presents us with an escrowed, publicly reviewed, unbreakable strong encryption algorithm which is mandatory? We need to concentrate on the basic issues here and state them clearly many times in language the public can understand. The public slap in the face our agenda received the other day on the crypto export issue should be proof enough that our enemies will accept nothing less than the total surrender of our right to personal privacy. It's time to stop being nice. When you go after the King, you shoot to kill. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $