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Re: 4th ammendment and Cryptography
I'll second Phil Karn's recommendation of Caroline Kennedy's book,
though I do remember it having somewhat of a liberal "Government is Good" bias.
Unless I'm mixing it up with another book I read around the same time,
it's also the one place where I've seen a recent 3rd Amendment case.
The case was interesting largely because 3rd Amendment cases are
very rare; the U.S. government hasn't quartered troops in people's homes
except during the War Between The States, when it was ignoring
the Constitution and Bill of Rights anyway. The issue was a prison
guard strike, in which the National Guard was brought in to replace
striking guards until the contract dispute was settled. Guards at the
prison had rooms there for sleeping and off-duty use, and the National
Guard, which is part of the military, used them during the strike.
The guards contended that this was quartering troops in their homes.
I think the government won the case rather than the prison guards,
since it was really stretching the point.
Phil's concerns about not freaking people out by emphasizing that the
Second Amendment is designed to make overthrowing governments possible
are well-placed (notwithstanding the fact that it's true.)
It may be good rhetoric to use at a pro-gun meeting, though a lot of
the NRA people I've met tend to get upset by the word "anarchy",
but the general public just barely tolerates duck hunting and
really has no desire for violent revolution, and frankly, neither do I.
We're trying to go for their hearts and minds here, and issues like
privacy, freedom of speech, and Big Brother tapping your phone
are a lot more attractive to most people. Even the ideas that
private communications can make government obsolete and that obsolete
institutions can fail are pretty scary to people who've been educated
in government schools, and associating crypto-privacy with the
more extreme radically-correct side of the Gun Nuts will lose them -
especially when there *are* legitimate concerns about use of
anonymity and digicash for blackmail, ransom, and funding of real terrorists,
plus the government's favorite drug dealer scare.
Besides, walking around making unattributed quotations from the
writings of the Founding Fathers tends to get you treated like
David Koresh or at the very least Michael Milken....
Bill
# Bill Stewart AT&T Global Information Solutions, aka NCR Corp
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