----- Original Message ----- From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>; Canadian Cryptography Mailing List <crypto-canada@greatvideo.com> Cc: Cypherpunks Mailing List <cypherpunks@cyberpass.net> Sent: Saturday, October 07, 2000 22:55 PM Subject: Re: Comments on and about e-privacy in Canada
At 16:38 10/6/2000 -0700, Tim May wrote, in response to Robert Guerra:
Again you show yourself to be uncritical of these claims. You don't "get it." [...] The solution is not a regimen of data privacy laws but tecnologies to enable consumers to remain private. Those who "give permission" for their refrigerator to contact some outside party have made their choice.
Right. There are solid principled reasons to oppose government regulations on what people can and can't do with information. Let them make up their own minds instead. There are also economic arguments, as Richard Epstein recently spoke about (http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38893,00.html).
And there's the fact that laws against such things usually either explicitly except government ("legitimate law-enforcement needs", <ptooey!>) actions, or are basically ignored when a cop (term used generically) violates them. Such laws lead to a false sense of security among the sheeple who aren't aware that the biggest fox around has a gate-key. It also deters manufacturers of secure hardware and software because their target audience is falsely placated. Why, for example, do secure, encrypted telephones not yet exist in an EASILY useable form? ("Go to Radio Snack, buy the box, take it home, plug it in.") Technically, it's quite possible: 1 Gigaflop DSP's are available and should be far more than necessary, 28K bidirectional modems are dirt-cheap, etc. Jim Bell