-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Bill Stewart wrote:
At 10:45 PM 9/18/97 -0700, Wei Dai wrote:
Many of us believe that a crypto ban is inevitable. The only question for us is whether it'll happen sooner or later. Seen in this perspective, all that industry and civil liberties lobbies can do is delay the ban. But is this necessarily a good thing?
Yes. Later is bad, but sooner is worse. First of all, "Soon" means "We lost already", while "Later" means "We haven't lost yet, even though it looks pretty much like we're going to lose later,...
Even if we lose a battle legislatively tomorrow, this does not mean we have "lost". In practice, people can still write code and distribute it, the same way people are still making LSD, growing mushrooms, or growing marijuana. Code propagates easily which means that so long as there is any place in the world where it can be safely used, it will be. Even if it is illegal throughout the world, there are going to be places where the local administrators are too corrupt or incompetent to really enforce the law. (The law is more or less impossible to enforce anyway because you have to charge people with possession of random data.) This means that somebody will be using the stuff, and the New Renaissance will still happen, but the benefits will have to propagate back into the United States for a change. The greatest risk is of a major government going "ape" over this issue and randomly persecuting those they suspect of doing illegal arithmetic without real evidence or real trials. The passing of a law may mitigate this because they will feel as if they are doing something, even if the "problem" was not entirely solved. Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNCKgi5aWtjSmRH/5AQF5Bgf/UWVTAU8Mk4g8QMX7ya1OnMPbbQvH14wE Lq2Lr+FKYYjQLRTH3UYMPjl+mxXJWhnIxGrK6SNSE3kh+InRpzX1jPtGBpYVXq/9 fr1YgkzjUilcN5dHRxwAO4ciwFmTu0ZCHORhk90DcnwQOBdckXN5ykjGZ3CTGEQA IXrhnV6sK3Ovuxe73WSuaZ+lOUPCMs4SVvnKIeWb4JWy0L3j4YwsmYu0aVVqNAeg Kd2sXYqaBxnitXFg+KTppcW16k9AqSMbFK5+Go3dIM1wZOI8kJKBTE9+Iw6u/zff tvZGXJWGRHB4e4VRf+OAttaP7Aalqx83AHMXe6WhhDUFqXJ7WmhkQw== =UOyl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----