On Thu, 25 Jan 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Phill refers to the man who said "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail", (Henry L. Stimson) as a twit.
I highly disagree. In some ways I regard him as our patron saint (although the man was actually far from saintly and later as a member of the Roosevelt cabinet adopted an opposite policy of aggressive signals intelligence.)
Why is he our patron saint? He was a government official coming out against invasion of privacy. Isn't that what we are all after, in the end? The reason we deploy cryptography is to assure privacy for all. We often refer to those who listen in on conversations (regardless of who they are) as, in some sense, our opposition. Therefore, is not Stimson's remark in closing down Yardley's "Black Chamber" to be praised rather than attacked?
Sorta, but not really. Relying on gentlemanliness to protect privacy is a fallacy. Assuming that gentlemen run the government (or any other entity with power over you) can be quite dangerous. Being a gentleman (or a lady, in the classical sense), though, is a Good Thing. The fact that the well-informed people on this list tend to be good ladies and gentlemen is a Very Good Thing. I believe that the choice not to read other people's personal mail is an ethical imperative, since we do not have and probably can not have total privacy enforced by technology and law alone. Sure, strong crypto helps, and should be spread, but there will always be back doors and implementation bugs, and in the worst case, most people will give in to moderate torture. It's hard to say what the ethical role of individuals in the government (or Jim Bell's "assassination politics" organization, which quacks like a government for me) is. The realist (Morgenthau, Fromkin, Krasner) school of IR, not to mention Machiavelli, holds that it is an ethical imperative to lie, cheat, and steal to further the national interest. A diplomat was defined, by whom I don't recall, as "a gentleman sent abroad to lie for his country." -rich