Phil Karn (karn@qualcomm.com) writes:
If I hadn't seen the show with my own eyes, I never would have believed it. The Religious Right, so ready to mind everyone else's personal business and to reshape the government in its own image, opposes something that would make it easier for the government to control the private lives of its citizens.
Let's be honest, though ... the "Non-Religious Left" is interested in the same thing (though in different ways). Just about everybody in politics wants to change something or other.
Of course, the Religious Right is at odds with the current government, what with talk of using the federal racketeering laws against anti-abortion demonstrators. So perhaps they can be forgiven for their current anti-government stance.
It ain't just governments that oppose the religious right. There are a lot of moves on college campuses lately to kick conservative religious groups off campus because they aren't PC. I can easily see a time when having cryptography might be very useful to me if the administration at my university starts grepping my e-mail to see if my group meets the latest PC test. Sure, the US government tends to like Christian folks right now. But there are lots of governments around that don't -- ask people who live in Muslim countries where being a Christian is illegal, punishable by death as heresy. Any applications for cryptography there?
And there's supreme irony in the right to encryption and the right to abortion both being founded in the same basic concept: personal privacy. It all depends on whose ox is being gored, I guess.
The problem ain't with privacy ... it's with what do you with privacy. Should we all have microphones installed in our homes because the privacy of my house out in the country means that I can beat my wife and no-one will hear her scream? The problem isn't that my house is private ... the problem is that I'm a jerk. So make being a jerk illegal and forget the microphones. Disclaimer: I don't have a house or a wife, and 4 out of 5 officemates don't think I'm a jerk ... Jim Huggins (huggins@eecs.umich.edu)