Re: 4th ammendment and Cryptography

[Phil Karn <karn@qualcomm.com>]

>With all due respect, I find it difficult to reconcile Ms. Kennedys
>assertion that "the people" refers collectively to state organized
>militia in the second amendment, without carrying this inference elsewhere.

I re-read the chapter on the 2nd amendment. I can't find *anything*
that qualifies as a statement of personal opinion. The closest is a
statement that "...the courts have not supported this interpretation",
referring to the claim by "the gun lobby and certain scholars" that
"citizens have a constitutional right to pack a gun". This is a
statement of fact about what the courts have said, not a statement of
the authors' personal opinions. The discussion of the Morton Grove
case that they chose to illustrate the issue contains many quotes from
both sides, including the gas station owner who was robbed because
he had stopped wearing a gun to appear to be in compliance with the law.

>Her book is extremely fast reading, and well, light.

Sorry you didn't like it. I stand behind my recommendation; I think
it's an excellent collection of essays for the layman. Each essay
picks a clause of the Bill of Rights and shows how it was interpreted
by the courts in a real case. Included (and far more relevant to the
right to develop and use cryptography than the 2nd amendment) is
"US. vs The Progressive". In this 1979 case in Wisconsin, the
government obtained, for the first time ever, prior restraint against
the publication of privately generated and assembled information that
the government considered "sensitive" - in this case, a layman's
educated guess, working from open sources and his own understanding of
physics, as to how thermonuclear weapons work. The case was eventually
dropped, however, when another "nuclear hobbyist" published his own
work.  Since there has been at least one call to regulate cryptography
under the same "born classified" terms as nuclear weapons (by
Adm. Inman in the early 1980s), there are a lot of useful insights in
this case.

The section on the 4th amendment is also highly relevant (see the
subject line here). The authors chose "McSurely vs McClellan", a case
that I had never heard of. It showed just how egregious the police can
be in abusing their authority when they are politically motivated.
Although cryptography was not at issue here, it shouldn't be hard to
use this case as an example of its potential importance in defending
against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Phil