US Attorney General nominee is pro-privacy

sunder sunder at sunder.net
Thu Jan 4 09:52:25 PST 2001


http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/15795.html

US Attorney General nominee is pro-privacy
By: Kevin Poulsen
Posted: 04/01/2001 at 01:35 GMT

To civil liberty groups, President-elect George W. Bush's pick for US attorney general is an ultra-right wing Christian conservative
who fought abortion and gun control, and blocked the appointment of a black Missouri judge to the federal bench. But veteran cyber
libertarians know John Ashcroft as something else: a once-fierce ally in the successful battle to unshackle encryption technology.


As a US senator, Ashcroft was one of a handful of lawmakers who fought to tear down encryption export regulations -- the federal
rules that kept strong security and privacy-protecting technology out of mainstream commercial products. Ashcroft's views put him in
direct opposition to FBI director Louis Freeh, who argued for years that unrestricted encryption would allow criminals to thwart
lawful government surveillance.


<SNIP>

-- 
----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :Surveillance cameras|Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\
  \|/  :aren't security.  A |share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\
<--*-->:camera won't stop a |monitor, or under your keyboard, you   \/|\/
  /|\  :masked killer, but  |don't email them, or put them on a web  \|/
 + v + :will violate privacy|site, and you must change them very often.
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------





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