Criminalizing crypto criticism

[Morlock Elloi]

>get good leverage that will ultimately help the most people.  But some
>people -- I predict many people -- are going to twist in the wind or
>in prison for years, before the courts or Congress are pushed into
>fixing the havoc caused by rabid copyright maximalists.  So what if it

It was never and never will be in the interest of the government and its
concessionees to have crypto-educated general public (EU commission called for
more crypto solely because they were pissed off that US agencies can snoop EU
subjects better than EU agencies themselves - this is a temporary aberration).

There is no money to "push courts or Congress". Unlike alcohol Prohibition bad
crypto is much harder to explain - do not expect mass rallies. Those 80 in San
Jose and maybe another hundred or two worldwide is the total number. If the
logic of late sixties still holds, few hundred protesters is far below the
Congress influence threshold.

>decimates our profession?  We're a tiny minority of society, and we
>don't bribe any legislators.  They'll only notice that we matter after
>we're gone, when their security infrastructures fall to bits.

It seems to me that the thesis about the *value* of cypherpunks' enhancement of
security by breaking weak solutions needs to be qualified. Those advances (so
far) tend to help "general public" realise what the state of security is (GSM,
802.11, DeCSS, Deep Crack, eBook) and tend to hurt corporations and government.
This charity service *costs* those two a lot - real money is lost because of
it. Replacement of 56-bit DES costs tons of cash and fucks up echelonning. I
wouldn't hold my breath for "courts or Congress" to appreciate it.

This should stay a pure thought-crime and freedom of speech issue.

Maybe we should engage in "Fahrenheit 451"-like solutions: memorizing banned
code and saying it aloud. A simple program that adds redundancy to C so that
spoken version can be correctly transliterated into the working code would do. 


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