Re: Crypto Takes a Holiday (NYET, Children, etc.)

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

> 
> [remove reflective headgear, cough, adjust nomex underwear, blow whistle..]
> 
> Good afternoon.
> 
> Having just percipitated an accidental thread on rockets, I'm not one to
> talk, really. That's never really stopped me before, of course...

Chill out. This is a quiet day on Cypherpunks, and clearly a lot of
people have views on this. If you'd rather debate whether
multiplicative Abelian subgroups contain inverses which can be used
for crypto purposes, go ahead.

> However, if someone could tell me a direct relationship between strong
> crypto and parental values, control of one's offspring, evangelical
> christianity, and other inherent Rights of Mankind(tm), I would greatly
> appreciate it...

The connection, tenuous (but no more tenuous that a hundred other
threads these past two years), is that of source-level or
receiver-level blocking is central to many of the proposals here and
in general:

* Centralized control: Source-level blocking. "We must protect the
innocents from X" (Where X is, variously: pro-Christian material,
anti-Christian material, pro/con Muslim, Mormon, Jewish, etc.
material, violent images, Barney images, sex, anti-sex, etc.).

* Decentralized, market control: Receiver-level blocking. "I'll decide
what I want to see." Local filter agents, local control. (This
includes voluntary services like Prodigy, provided an alternative
exists.)

Strong crypto makes the second view impossible to stop.

Is this enough of a connection?

Or should we declare this debate illegal and go back to asking what
the best way to generate random numbers is?

(I'm not dissin' the random number people...we've just seen that
debate too many times, with too little advance progress by people who
refuse to check out the Blum-Blum-Shub papers and whatnot.)

I doubt I can convince Nathan Zooks that his idea for a world-wide
police state to ensure that children are not exposed to anti-Christian
material is a lousy idea, or that I can convince Mike Duvos that his idea
of mandating access to Nathan's "Funny Mentalist" children so as to
de-program them is an equally lousy idea, but I sure do hope I can
convince most of you that central control just doesn't work.

Let the ideas compete, but don't argue for a Net that is what the
Unites States was ostensibly organized to avoid.

It ain't perfect, and neither will crypto-anarchy be perfect, but it
beats having cops come to my door.

--Tim May

-- 
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