Canada slaughters civil rights

[Tim May]

On Monday, October 15, 2001, at 08:44 PM, Meyer Wolfsheim wrote:

> It's convenient that ZKS dropped Freedom from it's product line,
> nicely dodging the issue of "harboring terrorists."
>
> Hrmm. Tim's been saying this for quite a while, and it's only going to 
> get
> worse.


Not just this, but they did it with an unacceptable amount of warning.

(Seven days, versus the past couple of years of obvious trends. It 
doesn't take much neural processing to see that their sudden 
re-focussing on some bullshit product like "cookie management" is a 
response to the new climate of fear.)

I'm surprised there has been little discussion (any discussion?) of the 
NAI decision this past week to lay off 250 of the 300 PGP employees (*) 
and to either sell the division to someone or abandon it completely.

(* As with ZKS and their couple of hundred employees, just how are 300 
PGP employees justified? As the comments on Slashdot point out, just how 
the hell does a product which has been evolving _very_ slowly 
conceivably justify 250-300 employees? DilbertWorld, obviously.)

> http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/10/15/rec.attack.canada.reut/index.
> html
>
> OTTAWA, Oct 15 (Reuters) -- Canada unveiled a sweeping security bill on
> Monday to ban fund-raising by terrorist groups, widen wiretapping
> authority and allow police to make preventive arrests of people they 
> think
> will engage in terrorism.

Which, by the way, is _precisely_ the scenario I presented to Austin and 
Hammie in the late fall of 1998 when we met in Menlo Park. What are you 
going to do, I asked, when the RCMP says that a terrorist has hijacked 
the Queen's plane and ZKS is being ordered to reveal the mapping of 
identities? Can't do it, you say? Fine, then you're out of business as 
of right now.

The notion of a central service, located in a known location and subject 
to some nation's laws, is ludicrous.

ZKS founders said that they Canada was a "crypto haven" compared to the 
U.S., indicating deep confusion about just what it was Canada was more 
liberal about (export laws) and what it was Canada was more repressive 
about (nearly everything else). Most importantly of all, Canada is a 
second cousin to the U.S. and does what it is told to do, with no 
constitutional niceties.

So, NAI is abandoning PGP (no great loss, actually), ZKS is abandoning 
Freedom (ditto), and some crypto luminaries are falling all over 
themselves to support police state measures.

And, ironically, it won't make us one whit safer.

Ben was right.

--Tim May, Occupied America
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety 
deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.