Re: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail"

[Rich Graves <llurch@networking.stanford.edu>]

On Thu, 25 Jan 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> Phill refers to the man who said "Gentlemen do not read each other's
> mail", (Henry L. Stimson) as a twit.
> 
> I highly disagree. In some ways I regard him as our patron saint
> (although the man was actually far from saintly and later as a member
> of the Roosevelt cabinet adopted an opposite policy of aggressive
> signals intelligence.)
> 
> Why is he our patron saint? He was a government official coming out
> against invasion of privacy. Isn't that what we are all after, in the
> end? The reason we deploy cryptography is to assure privacy for
> all. We often refer to those who listen in on conversations
> (regardless of who they are) as, in some sense, our
> opposition. Therefore, is not Stimson's remark in closing down
> Yardley's "Black Chamber" to be praised rather than attacked?

Sorta, but not really.

Relying on gentlemanliness to protect privacy is a fallacy.

Assuming that gentlemen run the government (or any other entity with power
over you) can be quite dangerous. 

Being a gentleman (or a lady, in the classical sense), though, is a Good
Thing. The fact that the well-informed people on this list tend to be good
ladies and gentlemen is a Very Good Thing.

I believe that the choice not to read other people's personal mail is an
ethical imperative, since we do not have and probably can not have total
privacy enforced by technology and law alone. Sure, strong crypto helps,
and should be spread, but there will always be back doors and
implementation bugs, and in the worst case, most people will give in to
moderate torture. 

It's hard to say what the ethical role of individuals in the government
(or Jim Bell's "assassination politics" organization, which quacks like a
government for me) is. The realist (Morgenthau, Fromkin, Krasner) school
of IR, not to mention Machiavelli, holds that it is an ethical imperative 
to lie, cheat, and steal to further the national interest.

A diplomat was defined, by whom I don't recall, as "a gentleman sent
abroad to lie for his country." 

-rich