At 09:32 AM 6/21/96 -0700, you wrote:

And notice that increasingly the "journalists" are the quoted thinkers and strategists in important areas? Someone majors in English, starts writing for "Netizen" or "HotWired," and the next thing you know they're debating crypto policy with Conrad Burns and Dorothy Denning. We're in an age where the medium truly is the message

You don't think the rest of the press is truly any better, do you? At least on the net, you get to see the horse's mouth on a bad day, and sometimes you can even meet the people and track down the rumors hat eventually become headlines, and pull the wool over your own eyes. Dorothy Denning may know a lot of mathematics about cryptography, but that doesn't make her any more fit to decide what policies the government ought to enforce than I am. She'll get the technical details correct far more often than Senator Burns, as would most people here, but being a trained ethicist would perhaps be more relevant than being a trained mathematician - it doesn't take that much technical explanation to know that crypto lets you have private conversations. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs # Dispel Authority!