Interesting forum on CSPAN

[Mike Fletcher <fletch@ain.bls.com>]

	Was channel surfing last night while MST3K was in a commercial
and wound up watching a panel on CSPAN from the World Economic Forum
on "Technology & Security".  The pannelists were Nicholas Negroponte
from MIT's Media Lab, John Barlow from the EFF, a Mike Nelson from the
White House (no relation to MST3K's :), and two other people whom I
can't for the life of me remember their names (one was from a security
consulting firm, and the other was a lawyer from something like the
"Bristol Group").  It was 3am, so sue me. :)

	I missed the first few minutes, but there was a bunch of
administration encryption policy bashing from all sides.  Nelson kept
saying that the administration wanted to support "good strong
encryption" and they wanted to be able to say (paraphrasing) "We think
this is good.  Use this."  (Trust us, we're from a TLA. :) He also
kept saying that (again, paraphrasing) "most encryption out there is
no good".  Which begs the question then why are they wanting to ban
its use and export.  Negroponte kept bringing up the point that their
policy was based on the (flawed, as we all believe) assumption that no
one outside the US could create good crypto.

	Other topics that were touched on were intellectual property
rights and e$.  It was interesting that the lawyer person agreed to a
good extent with a lot of the remarks Barlow made.  Overall it was
pretty interesting (and not just to watch the White House guy squirm
as his premises were invalidated out from under him :).  CSPAN
usually replays stuff like this at odd times during the weekend so
you might want to keep your eyes peeled.

---
Fletch                                                     __`'/|
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