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I responded the way I did to John Kreznar's post precisely because it looked identical to standard Republican-style leftist-baiting,
Actually, I _was_ deliberately baiting leftists, but I was doing so to challenge their conceit that a liberal State is more congenial to individual liberty than any other kind of State and therefore ought to be less hostile to cryptography. Remember Mike Schenk's original words:
I have always thought that the Netherlands was a very liberal country. But now the government is proposing a law that totally outlaws the use of encryption methods.
Last I heard, the Netherlands is a State. (So he's apparently talking about ``liberal'' as a kind of Statism, not as a synonym for anarchism as I would prefer. Mike Schenk, are you there to clarify?) A State is a State. The purpose of a State is to supplant personal choice with the State's choice. (To the extent that the State is a democracy, this means supplanting personal choice with collective dictate.) ``Liberal'' or not, a State is threatened by strong cryptography because it helps to enable a person to choose for himself in spite of the State. John E. Kreznar | Relations among people to be by jkreznar@ininx.com | mutual consent, or not at all. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLZ09xMDhz44ugybJAQHriwQA1U8Yo4unADyxFmWuAEhukJPQj6980tzb UqgHxeXg8Qv9d5+V7uBFIrYw47SCzC0gpwHglofJpQLCxZHipUNNr8MFClM1fOaB ko8B9gNxjP1386m1n6USBZEy2pEtmR2Szg2Q3wRvks6EDDsdjQD9GRU7dXAjgnmI MFEF/DXt1YY= =7bLt -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----