At 3:09 pm -0400 on 9/26/97, Jonah Seiger wrote:
We believe that passage of SAFE with the White-Markey amendment, despite the problems with the criminal provisions, is on balance, a step forward in the fight for encryption policy reform.
And *I* "believe" that anyone who would spout such dreck, evidently out of both sides of his mouth, is an ironclad fuckwit, no matter his talent for such copralalic oral gymnastics. I also "believe" that the combination of words like "Center", and "Democracy", and "Technology" in any *sentence*, much less in an organization's name, is a three-dimensional oxymoron, especially in this day and age, and particularly on issues like cryptography and digital commerce. You folks at CDT have proven, time and time again, to be comically, if not criminally, negligent in the defense of freedom, and, worse, :-), economics, which, fortunately, can take care of itself without any "help" from "Centers" for "Democracy" and Technology like yours, thank you very much. Paradoxically, fools like you *are* helpful, but not in the grandiose way you imagine. You are the crypto equivalents of Lenin's "useful idiots". That is, you'll keep the dance band on the Titanic playing "Nearer My God to Thee" in the bar while the rest of us with any sense are making for the lifeboats. There's more room that way, so it's nice of you to oblige, and all... Better yet, you guys are like courtiers in Madrid, knifing each other in back alleys and sleeping with each other's wives while the rest of us are out making something useful out of the new world's wilderness. It seems to me the less you know about what we can do with cryptography, particularly financial cryptography, the better off all of us probably are. You keep winning your increasingly less relevant turf wars, and we'll keep making the world safer from people like you. Sounds perfectly fair to me. The way I understand it, it took Madrid a good 300 years before it realized it never had control over the western hemisphere to begin with. Same with London, now that I think about it, but it only took us in North America 200 years or so to get rid of statist empire-builders like you. Must be the colder climate, or something. So, I guess the rest of us, those who want to make money with cryptography, had better get on with it, and get used to your antics as part of the background noise. If we convert 200 years into internet dog-years, we have another 30 years of your incessant nattering to live with. Fortunately, it'll be annoying, but not fatal. The old Californios had an expression. It went something like: "God is in Heaven. The King is in Spain. The Governor is in Mexico City. And I, mercifully, am right here, as far away as possible from all three." Via Con Dios, Bunky. Stay out of those back alleys, and always keep your sword nearby when fucking your neighbor's (or your supposed "constituent's") wife. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/