At 8:52 PM 3/25/96, David K. Merriman wrote:

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At 11:25 PM 03/25/96 -0800, tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) wrote:

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I try to avoid "me too" echoes, but this is worth concurring with, strongly.

Nothing good can come out of "raising awareness," especially of an issue where the Consitution is already pretty clearly on the side of the right to speak in whatever language one chooses, to keep diaries in code if one wishes, to whisper to others, to place curtains on windows, to lock doors, and so on. (I suppose Jim Bell will point out that the Constitution contains no explicit language about placement of curtains....)

Regrettably, I must disagree with Mr. May on the matter of speaking in whatever language one chooses. It seems that here in Texas (specifically, here in Amarillo), a local judge informed a Hispanic family that they were prohibited from speaking _only_ Spanish to their child at home. The rationale was that since English is the (ostensibly, in this area) Public Language of the school system here, failure to encourage use of English would adversely impact the child's education, and was thus a form of child abuse. If need be, I can provide excerpts from the local snoozepapers coverage of the issue.

Right, and I've cited this "family law" case recently here in Cyphepunks as an example of an aberrant, unconstitutional law (family law has a lot of such things...it may come from the hard-to-untangle situation of a family). I don't take specific statutes or interpretations, such as this example, as being the same as what the Constitution says. Though it may come to the point where what's in the Constitution is buried under a blizzard of such exceptions and special cases. In any case, I think the First Amendment is a better protection of cryptographic rights than is some putative (and arguably nonexistent) "right to privacy." --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."