Re: Some angles of attack George:

2nd amendment (original grounds: protection against tyrrany)

I've thought for a year or so now that if the State Department was going to class cryptography as munitions, then they have _de jure_ acknowledged that civilian use of cryptography is protected under the Second Amendment. Cryptography is not a weapon and should not be restricted for public safety reasons.

1st amendment. Re the latter, a lawyer I spoke with some years ago, proposed the idea that freedom of speech in some cases depends on the ability for the speaker to determine who will and who will not receive what is said.

This criterion may be valid, but I don't think it's needed. As I understand it, the restrictions on speech that do exist restrict 1) certain contents, not speech as such, and 2) speech which is public, not private. Encrypted text, by the fact that it is encrypted, is intended to be removed from the public domain. And restricting the transmission of encrypted text based on some assumed content is prior restraint. I'm not sure that any of these arguments really touch a key registration proposal, unfortunately. Guns may be sold, but also registered. It is not the speech that is restricted, but the privacy from the Justice Dept. which is restricted. What I suspect may be more effective is to argue, based on the Tenth (or Ninth? I get them confused) Amendment, that the Federal Government has not been granted specific power to require the registration of key material under any of its other powers.

Then of course there is always good oldfashioned civil disobedience.

But the percentage of users of cryptography for communications is a small percentage of the total population as of yet. Eric