Robert Hettinga wrote:

Thursday, July 10, 1997; Page A18 The Washington Post From testimony by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Today, Americans . . . enjoy the ability to use, and industry is free to market, commercial encryption of any strength domestically without restriction.

Try to think of laws as outlining what we are no longer free to do. Then go to a courthouse library and look at the mountains of books which contain a list of the freedoms that have been taken away from us. Who the fuck do the people who pass these laws think they are? I wish I had a nickle for every local city councilman who got a hard-on the first time he got to vote on a bylaw that empowered him and his pals and fucked everyone else. Then, once he's convinced himself that this -->| |<-- is 12", he decides that it is his duty to run for Congress and share his "greatness" with the whole country. I try to pay my parking tickets more than 500' from a schoolyard and sell my drugs before the date I'm due to appear in court, but I keep getting in trouble because I just can't keep up with all of the intricate details involved in being a law-abiding citizen. What happened to the "good old days" when all you had to do was stay out of stone-throwing range of the "righteous" in order to live according to your own dictates? Today, the "righteous" feel that they have the right to come in your home whenever they want, demand the wrong to read all of your correspondence, tell you what you can put on your website, limit what thoughts you can express and how you do so. And it never ends. If you want to build a dog-house you have to deal with an army of people who are upholding the "righteousness" of city permits, union rules, ecology regulations, tax laws, and a multitude of similar bullshit. And if you happen to forget to cross a 't' or dot an 'i', then you find you are in violation of a new law which is classified as an "inconsequential felony." Def. 'inconsequential felony' -- A legal term which refers to a harmless action which is nonetheless subject to the severest of punishments because someone in authority got a wild-hair up their ass for some silly reason and deemed it should be so. I met a man in Texas who spent twenty years in prison for the possession of a few stems and seeds. He thought it ironic that the state had imprisoned him for twenty years to try to prevent him from doing something that someone else thought would ruin his life. He told me that at his sentencing, his mother told him, "I told you smoking dope would ruin your life." She got upset when he was "unrepentant" enough to reply, "No. I think the judge did that." The problem is not that the citizens are "sinners" but that Hatch and his ilk are "righteous." When the "righteous" take it on themselves to speak for a "higher power," whether it be "God" or "National Security," then they begin justifying even the most horrendous of actions as "just following orders." Thus, it's not really going to matter whether you are using crypto to encrypt children's pictures or a new version of the Bible. Coming new laws will make you a criminal either way, because the "righteous" feel that it is up to them to decide if the children's pictures are pornographic or if the new version of the Bible is sacreligious. Government has merely usurped religion as the final authority on who is "righteous" and who is a "sinner," on what is "good" and what is "bad." They are priests with nuclear weapons to back them up in enforcement of their "commandments." The end result is that we have to fear getting nuked if we build the fence around our house more than 5' high, so that the ever- vigilant "righteous" don't hurt themselves when peeking over our fence to see if we've built an illegal doghouse. And we have to fear getting nuked if we want to electronically "whisper" when the "righteous" are trying to spy on the "sinners." Same shit, different religion. TruthMonger