It's nice to see that the clueful memes are spreading, Gilder's congenital statism aside :-). Also from http://www.computer.org/internet/9701/gilder9701.htm .

Petrie: While we're on the subject of choice, what do you think about the First Amendment issues currently before the Supreme Court concerning the use of legislation to block the viewing of pornography on the Internet?

Gilder: My belief is that you don't have to change the laws to deal with the child pornography or snuff films or other extreme cases that are employed to justify sweeping regulation of the Net. I think they're a distraction, they're a red herring. My 12-year-old son is on the Net all the time and I'm eager for the evolution of techniques applicable at the terminal to lock out certain domains of the Internet to children. But I think that porn of sufficiently revolting character is widespread all over the society. If the politicians want to crack down, how about the Spectravision boxes in every hotel room?

To focus on the Internet bespeaks another agenda. And I don't approve of the other agenda, which is to control this new communication system, because the way they controlled the old one has been a disaster--it has greatly slowed the extension of bandwidth and led to this kind of optical illusion, or nonoptical illusion, that bandwidth is somehow scarce and difficult to create.

Petrie: This also reminds me of the paranoia about security on the Internet. For example, online banking on the Internet requires you to have a US-grade security browser, a user ID, and a password to access the same service you can use three digits to access by telephone.

Gilder: I completely agree with that observation. There is a paranoid note in this encryption and privacy issue. But I think corporations do have a real problem. If you're sending billions of dollars of value across the Net, you've created a huge incentive for people to break your codes and skim off some small proportion of your value flow.

Petrie: But we're not talking about financial transactions. Those have been secured for quite some time.

Gilder: But how? They're using the DES (data encryption standard) algorithm which is a fairly low level of encryption employed by banks for transmitting funds. I know it works--I really don't agree with the thesis that the Internet is insecure--however, I'm willing to imagine there are applications where you want more security than currently exists. But we are talking about a lot of issues here all at once. The encryption issue about terrorism, for example. Banning strong encryption in order to thwart terrorists means that only terrorists will have strong encryption. I really think that's accurate--or at least only foreign countries will be able to have encryption. So the encryption technology will tend to move overseas where it's completely beyond the reach of US security.

I think the government's going to figure out that they want the best encryption to be American. And to disagree with the current wisdom, there is an arms race. The arms race is with the terrorists. There's no question about it. But there is no quick technical fix for this arms race. The government has to understand this is a dynamic rather than a static arms race, and you won't be able to solve the problem by treaty. The problem is that of evil in the world, and it's something all of us, including people who want a wild and woolly Internet, depend on our government to address.

----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity." -- Jerry Pournelle The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/rah/