Questions for Magaziner? // taxing crypto

[Ron Rivest]

Hi Bob --

I feel mis-quoted and/or mis-represented in your note (below)
stating that "Magaziner mirrored Rivest's offer to tax encryption
products to pay for increased law enforcement technology support".
While I do feel that some measure of appropriate balance may be
accomplished by increasing the budget of the FBI and other
law-enforcement to help them compensate for whatever increased
difficulties they encounter because of the widespread use of
encryption, I do not recall ever suggesting that the revenues for such
increased budgets be raised by specifically taxing encryption
products, and I don't really think that is a sensible approach.  We don't
tax glove manufacturers to raise funds for the FBI fingerprint lab!
Any such funding should come out of general revenues, not by further
complicating the tax code.

	     Cheers,
	     Ron


------- Start of forwarded message ------- Return-Path:
<cryptography-owner at c2.net> X-Sender: rah at pop.sneaker.net In-Reply-To:
<v03130304b227b7401a3a@[24.128.118.53]> Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998
16:44:07 -0400 To: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold at world.std.com>,
cypherpunks at cyberpass.net, cryptography at c2.net, dcsb at ai.mit.edu From:
Robert Hettinga <rah at shipwright.com> Subject: Re: Questions for
Magaziner?  Sender: owner-cryptography at c2.net

Okay, so the short precis on Magaziner's answer to my question about
encryption controls, foriegn or domestic, is he's agin it.

He says that controlling foriegn encryption is impossible, and controlling
domestic encryption is, at the very least, unconstitutional.

He says that the reason the administration's encryption policy is so
convoluted is that the law enforcement and the "economic" encryption camps,
anti, and pro, evidently, is that the two sides are at loggerheads.
Magaziner mirrored Rivest's offer to tax encryption products to pay for
increased law enforcement technology support, but, hey, he's a liberal
democrat, he's supposed to tax us to death without thinking about the
economic, and, of course privacy consequences of raising the price of
encryption.

So, all in all, he got a round of foot-stomping applause from this bunch on
his pro-encryption stance, because, evidently, being a payments technology
forum, he was preaching to the choir. Something I found out when I was
doing my own speech yesterday. I should realize that anyone building a
payment system knows that digital commerce is financial cryptography, after
all. :-)

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga
- -----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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