I think that *this* debate should be injected in the population and the *bogus* "national security" debate should be dismissed as, just that : bogus.
Never underestimate how weirded out people can get about "security". You don't know about this, living in Canada, but nobody in America can use a mailbox to mail a package now, just because one guy mailed a few bombs. We live in a time in which rocks in the parks have warning labels bolted to them ('Caution: Slippery when wet'). I could go on forever and so could you. Health and security are the governing superstitions of our age. Allowing uncontrolled encryption not only seems to open the door to specific bogeymen, but frustrates the power of the 'security apparatus' in general and across the board. Nothing is scarier than rhetoric about the police being helpless to protect you. Few politicans are willing to leave themselves open to the charge of not standing by the police or tying the police's hands. I think 99 out of a hundred politicians 'thinking' about encryption never get past this point. Most of them don't know enough to know that tax collection is even an issue. (Not that it probably is; governments used to raise most of their money by taxing atoms -- real property and capital goods -- and nobody I know has thought of a reason why they can't do it again.)
For most peoples, privacy in itself is worth something only if if they have some *value* they want to preserve. Most of the time, this value concretizes itself as "money". So if we talk to them in terms *they* understand, we run a much better chance to make them understand why spreading crypto is a tool we believe will greatly enhance human's life quality.
Any comments about why we should *not* put most emphasis on the financial aspect of crypto?
What are you saying here? That we should be arguing that encryption should be permitted because it will allow people to avoid paying taxes? I'm afraid the set of people that would respond well to that argument is not was large as you would hope. Fred www.pobox.com/~hapgood