rhetorical trickery

[Perry E. Metzger]

jamesd at echeque.com writes:
> At 02:36 PM 3/10/96 -0500, Mark M. wrote:
> > There was an article in the July 1995 issue of Technology Review by
> > Dorothy Denning explaining the "evils of encryption" in defense of the
> > Clipper Chip which mentions this case.  I suspect that it actually
> > happened.
> 
> Why should the fact that Dorothy Denning says something lead you to 
> suspect that it actually happened?

Denning has happily talked about snuff films in the past. James is
dead on that Denning is not a credible source.

On the other hand, Phil Zimermann has personally told me of a case in
which the police had trouble with a child molester using PGP in the
stated manner. He is a credible source for this.

Let us remember that just as murderers can use perfectly useful
household knives to do their evil deeds, and we should not therefore
ban cooking utensils, so it is to be expected that privacy tools would
be used sometimes for evil as well as for good. A free society does
not ban cars because they can be used to run people down, and does not
ban PGP just because on rare occassions it is used to conceal the
diary of a child molester.

Perry