Anonymous, signing as Monty Cantsin, Editor in Chief of Smile Magazine quotes my Cypherpunks summary's quote of Eric Hughes:
Martin Minow wrote:
EH: Why do the Fed's want access to plaintext? The motivation has not been made clear. Policy goals are stated in technological terms, not in policy terms.
Perhaps we can elaborate on this. Judging from their actions, what they want is a full blown police state. They've seen the product, now they want one of their own. This is obvious to everybody on this list, but sometimes people are coy about it, probably in an effort to appear to be "legitimate".
Sorry, it isn't obvious to me. The most paranoid I can work myself up to is to assume that some (not all) of our leaders want to restore their half-remembered 1950's Dick-and-Jane, big car, Eisenhauer suburbian childhood; and are afraid that letting absolute privacy loose will be the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it. This parallels the battles that were waged in the early 1960's, as the civil rights movement (and the Pill) shattered the myth of suburbia. The police and FBI felt, quite sincerely, that they were in the midst of a revolution and had to take "necessary measures" to save America. The new cryptography makes the Internet safe for child pornographers, for revolutionaries, for criminals, as well as for human rights workers, for religious missionaries in unfriendly countries, and multinational corporations. The message I read from the attempt to criminalize strong cryptography is that the risk of damage from the pornographers (etc.) is so great that we must restrict cryptography and trust the national leadership to respect the rights of the good guys. Unfortunately, one country's human rights worker is another country's dangerous revolutionary. Remember, the Martin Luther King who was thrown in jail in Alabama in the early 1960's was the same Martin Luther Kings who received the Nobel Peace Prize a few years later, and who was killed for his revolutionary activities just a few years after that. Whether he was a hero or villian depends on who writes the history book and it is, ultimately, our responsibility to make sure that many, conflicting, history books can be written. Martin Minow minow@apple.com