Re: Is the public involved in the crypto policy debate?

[Alex Strasheim <cp@proust.suba.com>]

> = Tim

> To be fair to Jim Bell, he made the same point a day or so ago.

Then I agree with him on this.  I'm not making any claims of orginality or
of depth here -- it's a simple point, probably too obvious for most people
here to concern themsevles with.  But at the same time, it's a central
point.

Big business has a lot of clout in America.  People who stand on 
soapboxes in the park (or on the net) and make impassioned speeches on 
behalf of liberty don't.

I expect the "golden key" group will get the export restrictions on crypto
killed.  That's one head of the monster, although there will be other 
heads left.

> I don't necessarily sift Stewart Baker's words for hermeneutical signs of
> what the government is planning. He might just as well have included
> "public opinion" in his list, and nothing would change.

But he didn't.  You're right, it wouldn't have altered his argument in any
significant way if he had.  But the public *was* left of his "policy
triumverate".

I don't want to read too much into it either, but he was talking about 
the differences between who is participating in the crypto discussions in 
America and in Japan -- who's included and who's excluded was central to 
what he was saying, not an afterthought he hadn't thought through.

> And I'm quite sure that Baker, Denning, Nelson, et. al. are acutely aware
> of the role of the "public" in these matters. The "public" as made manifest
> in newspaper articles critical of Clipper, in "Wired" features against key
> escrow and in favor of Cypherpunks-type themes, and so on.

My impression is that they look at the vast majority of people who rail 
against clipper as spoiled children who don't know what's good for them, 
and who must be protected from their own folly.

Of course I'm not including people like Tim in that "vast majority".  Tim
ought to be flattered by how seriously they take his ideas on crypto
anarchy.  But people like me?  I don't think we figure into the 
equation.

> While the "vocal minority" that rails against Administration policy in
> sci.crypt, talk.politics.crypto, comp.org.eff.talk, this list, etc., are
> not the public at large, we are certainly a part of the public.

The only problem I have with this statement is that it's not strong 
enough.  Public sentiment is overwhelmingly lopsided in support of our 
point of view.

But does that have an effect on policy?

> I think the rejection of Clipper by "the public" is proof of this.

What killed Clipper?  It's hard to say.  There was certainly very strong
public opposition, but I'm not sure it was worth as much in the end as
Blaze's attack.  If Clipper had worked, it would probably be alive 
today.  Blaze's attack demonstrated that even those who aren't worried 
about the government's intentions ought to worry about its competence.

And although opposistion to Clipper from business was less visible than 
the current opposition to export restrictions, it was there.  AT&T was 
roundly criticized for agreeing to work with Clipper should it have come 
to pass, but they did speak out against it (and paid Matt's salary).

I'm inclined to give more credit to Blaze and the companies who spoke
against it than to public sentiment, although I can't think of an
objective way to confirm my suspicions.

> (If we were leftist theoreticians, we could debate for years or even
> decades whether our movement is truly a mass movement, or just a vanguard
> movement, etc.)

I'm not sure those distinctions are useful, but for whatever it's worth, I
don't think debates about crypto anarchy, or fights over key management
are ever going to be joined by the public at large.  It takes a lot of 
work to understand the issues, and most people have their hands full with 
the things that are going on in their own lives and careers.

Clipper was easy to grab ahold of -- big brother wants to put a
wiretapping chip in your phone, what do you think of that?  I don't know
that the rest of the points we'll fight over will be as accessible.  The 
devil's in the details, and the details are hard to slog through.

(I wasn't able to get any of my friends excited when Netscape let users 
choose which CAs to trust in 2.0b3, for example.)

All I'm really saying is that having business on our side of the export 
issue is a good thing, and it could very well be the difference between 
victory and defeat, despite the fact that some of the companies in 
question might have questionable credentials as civil libertarians.

The text Hal quoted gave some small reinforcement of that point of view,
in my opinion.  I wouldn't argue that it's enough to prove that big
businesses have a disproportionate amount of political clout -- that's
probably another job best left to the leftist theoreticians.