deltorto@aol.com
kelly@netcom.com [...] Law enforcement seems to have very similiar mentality as well, with CONTROL being the agenda and reason for existance--
Not meaning to be an appologist for law enforcement agencies (some of whom have gone off the deep end, this much is true...) but the purpose of law enforcement agencies is to enforce the laws and protect the populace. If you disagree with what they are doing, change the laws. Most of them are people doing a thankless job that I would never want to have...
Suppose we think of guerilla products such as PGP and anoynmous posting mechanisms and forwarders in their larger social sense As behaviour modification for those who would have our privacy as well as our lives
...and thus the government's decision to consider PGP (a privacy mechanism) as "munitions." At first I thought it was outrageous, but it all makes curious sense somehow when you bop yourself on the head the right way, doesn't it?
While we now look at this classification as "munitions" as somewhat silly, please remember when ITAR was established: 1943. At the time the US was at war, cryptographic devices were _real machines_, computers occupied entire buildings. The government did not decide to classify PGP as munitions, it classified _all_ cryptographic machines and processes as munitions (materials necessary for war) and at the time it was a very easy equivalence to make. There is a very good article about this by Peter Denning (and other crypto-related articles) in the July 1992 issue of Communications of the ACM. Now advanced cryptographic methods are used in private communications and business but the old definitions remain...
I say we should ensure that as many citizens as possible get ahold of PGP as soon as possible.
Definitely. Spread the source. jim