Outlawing general purpose computers *is* feasible

jamesd at echeque.com jamesd at echeque.com
Tue Jul 2 12:55:04 PDT 2002


    --
Tim May:
> > I have half a dozen computers, all usable in various ways. Not 
> > even in a Chinese-type police state could these 
> > legally-acquired computers, acquired for a lot of money, be 
> > declared "outlawed."

Major Variola (ret)
> First you register them.  Then declare them a public threat. 
> Then you confiscate. Buying up your old-style computers will be 
> cheap for the government. Most of the sheeple will be happy to 
> unload them.
>
> What, you didn't register your Lisa?  Better not use it online, 
> your ISP will be required to check for a registration cert 
> issued by the State.

As Stalin said
: : 	Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let 
: : 	our enemies have guns, why should we let them have 
: : 	ideas?

Of course the SSSCA will not fly, it is already dead in the water,
but something that is a small step towards it will fly, and then
someone will complain that the loopholes in that small step need
to be fixed, and so on and so forth.

The laws will always get worse unless they are massively broken. 
The restrictions on cryptography went away because everyone defied 
them, but anti circumvention and regional encoding seems to have 
succeeded, which is going to result in more of the same.

Same thing with money laundering.  I am glad to see that the 
recent terrorism related crackdown on money laundering has led to 
a massive upsurge in defiance of these new and old restrictions, 
which will doubtless eventually lead to some reasonable easing 
back. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
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     QsUHrGL2QNZlo+jpeCUba7pIlDWjzNaBIpOjWpVz
     2FWhsO3kXWr5ya6t8VAnzFkFZzpNYMpHTFxB2zK7L





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