At 03:23 PM 1/7/96 -0600, Alex Strasheim wrote:

But I don't necessarily look at the NSA as an enemy. Right now we're on opposite sides of an important issue, and I think they're doing a lot of damage. But I tend to think that they believe what they're doing is in the national interest. They're trying to defend democracy -- our democracy, at least.

I see no sign that NSA is capable of distinguishing between the interest of the state and the interest of the nation. It is perfectly clear that the threat that NSA is primarily concerned with comes from within, not from without.

So the question we ought to be putting to the NSA is this: isn't it in the best interest of the United States and the other capitalist Western democracies to impose the first ammendment on the rest of the world?

There is this big myth, spread partly by the US government, and partly by the radical left, notably Chomsky, that the US has been protecting the world against socialism: This is a load of old bananas. The US government has been pro socialist -- not as pro socialist as the IMF, and the IMF has not been as pro socialist as the Soviets -- but the US has still been shoving socialism down peoples throats in a heavy handed way, because they could get away with that kind of stuff abroad, when they cop hell for it at home. The nastiest piece of socialism was arguably the land reform scheme in El Salvador, which converted the peasants from tenants of a few powerful rural landlords, to serfs on state run collective farms. This screwed up agriculture big time, and the peasants detested it. If you want to use land reform to make peasants into anti communists, you use the method so successfully used in Taiwan. You make it possible for the peasant to buy land, and encourage him to buy land, and once he has some land of his own, and has sacrificed in order to obtain it, you can then trust him to resist communism. If there are communist guerrillas around, you should give him a shotgun. The US government followed a very different strategy in El Salvador, from which we may conclude that just as the South Vietnamese government considered that robbing the Montagnards, and rendering them powerless and afraid was more important than resisting North Vietnamese communism, the US government similarly considered that suppressing private property, was more important than resisting communist infiltration in El Salvador. El Salvador was vulnerable to communism because only two hundred families owned everything worth owning. If you want to prevent communism the kind of land reform you need is land reform that allows more people to acquire individual property rights.

I don't think the NSA is out to suppress our liberties. [...] it is a mistake to think of them as evil, as people who will tell any lie to get what they want.

I disagree. Two government officials, one of whom is a communist, have more in common than two communists, one of whom is a government official. The NSA is on the same side as the Chinese government, and if Chinese dissidents used crypto with US GAK, this information would be exchanged with the Chinese government. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd@echeque.com