On Thu, 29 Dec 1994 blancw@pylon.com wrote:
I also don't see much success in attempting to protect privacy through the promotion of morals, policies, or laws, either.
If we fail to point out that people have a right to privacy, if we fail to point out the moral and constitutional implications of coercive inspection, then our enemies win, by citing tax evaders child pornographers terrorists and pedophiles. Public key technology is totally ineffective against rubber hoses. How people are to live together peaceably is always first and formost a moral question. If all morality is relative, then the only possible way for people to live together peaceably is for a single authority to define morality absolutely by its arbitrary will and to impose that morality by as much violence as necessary -- this is the classic argument (Hobbes, Nazis) for absolutist government. If this is so, then of course private cryptography must be suppressed, and private ownership of guns, and as much as of the internet as is necessary to ensure that communication is strictly few to many rather than many to many. There are good historical examples of this kind of thing: In Japan, under feudalism, science and technology was proceeding well. They got hold of a western gun, and rapidly produced large number of excellent imitations. Now feudalism in Japan was based primarily on the fact that a samurai, trained from infancy in the are of war, wearing carefully tailored armor, could easily defeat a peasant with a sword. But they soon realized that guns were equalizers -- that a peasant with a gun was roughly equal to a samurai with a gun, even though a peasant with a sword was totally unequal to a samurai with a sword. So they banned guns, not only for the peasants, but for themselves, and ordered a halt to technology. This coercive reversal of technology was completely effective until outsiders with guns started knocking on their door. An even more relevant example is paper. When paper was first discovered, the Chinese government, forseeing the revolutionary threat posed by paper, made it a state monopoly, made private possession of the knowledge of paper manufacture punishable by death, castrated those permitted to make paper so that the knowledge would not be passed from father to son, and successfully kept paper to themselves for a very long time. This monopoly was broken when western barbarians kidnapped some of the eunuchs. This immediately made woodcut printing feasible, which had strong revolutionary effects, and eventually led to moveable type printing, which had even greater revolutionary effects. Note that the technology did not have revolutionary effects until it got into the hands of those who had strong moral beliefs, based on natural law theory, beliefs that led to the position that the king could not make law as he pleased, that many actions of the state were unlawful. --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we James A. Donald are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. jamesd@netcom.com