Racists Speak Up For Crypto

[qut@netcom.com (Skip)]

Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 15:28:48 -0700
From: ezundel@cts.com (E. Z�ndel)

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I have a sweet friend in Santa Barbara, California who grew up with me in
the rain forests of South America.  Elvira and I share many things,
including an "encryption language" of sorts.  We used it with relish as
teenagers when the Mennonite Elders were spying on us, trying to ferret out
secrets.

The key was really very simple, but our "government" just never  managed to
catch on.  It used to drive them wild.  Yet it was so ridiculously simple -
". . . repeat a vowel with a 'b'".

Prebesibidebent Clibintobon?

Kapish?

Just practice it a bit - no one will understands it!  It is hilarious.  It
gave us a tremendous edge on wickedness - mostly romantic wickedness but
now and then legitimate revolt against authority peddling a dogma we didn't
always like.

This story often comes to mind as I peruse the arguments regarding
censorship, particularly as I was reading a recent Phyllis Schlafly's essay
on "Clinton Is Trying to be Big Brother":

". . . We hope the appropriate government agencies will soon solve the
recent terrorist crimes and punish the criminals. But all Americans who
care about civil liberties should vigorously resist President Clinton's
attempt to use the terrorist attacks as an excuse to carry on his all-out
war against the personal privacy of law-abiding Americans.

Now the Clinton Administration is trying to make it illegal for individual
Americans to have private conversations with one another. That's the real
meaning of its effort to control encryption technology, and it's a direct
assault on the First Amendment.

It would be downright ridiculous to assert that the First Amendment
guarantees our right to speak in public but not in private. It would be
just as ridiculous to say that we have freedom to speak in words that the
government can understand, but not in words the government can't decipher.

Americans have the right to speak to one another in private, behind closed
doors, and we should likewise have the right to speak to one another in
code and to put our coded messages on computer in a process called
encryption. Americans would not tolerate the government opening and reading
the letters we send through the mails, and we should not tolerate the
government opening and reading our encrypted, or coded, messages sent via
computer.

Yet, Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Vice
President Al Gore are all demanding the authority to read our encrypted
messages. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, Reno bluntly
stated her demand for "ensuring law enforcement access to encrypted data.''

Reno boasted that there is "a consensus'' that the government should create
a system known as "Key Escrow'' (i.e., a supposedly "neutral third
party''), to which all Americans should be forced to "entrust'' the keys to
their encrypted messages, and to which the government would have access. On
the contrary, there is no such consensus.

Do you trust Janet Reno with access to your private messages? Do you trust
the FBI to keep your files confidential?

On July 12, Al Gore announced that the Administration will continue to push
for the adoption of a massive public key infrastructure to give the
government access to all encrypted communications. In a blatant bid for a
police-state surveillance society, Gore warned about "the dangers of
unregulated encryption technology."

A neutral panel of the National Research Council was set up to make policy
recommendations about encryption. The panel called on the government to
abandon its efforts to restrict encryption.

The NSC panel concluded that increased use of encryption would enhance our
national security, not diminish it. Thirteen out of its 16 members had
security clearances with access to secret information, and they saw no
national security reason to justify the Clinton policy.

The Clinton Administration bases its campaign to control private encryption
on the alleged need to fight crime through wiretapping. However, the NSC
panel concluded that the ability of the private sector to transfer
confidential financial and other data over the information highway without
interception is far more important.

Encryption is a First Amendment issue, not a crime issue. If the Clinton
Administration is allowed to control encryption, it would be the biggest
expansion of federal power since the passage of the Income Tax Amendment in
1913 . . ."

And come to think of it, still after all these years: the Elders had no
business whatsoever spying on some teenagers.  They made the laws, and they
enforced the laws, and it was pretty much authoritarian business, but even
as young teenagers we knew that what they did was Trespass!

They had their reasons - but we had ours!  It was called privacy.
Nebeveber lebet aba foobool kibiss youbou obor aba kibiss foobool youbou!

Advice to the wise in these perilous times.

Ingrid

Thought for the Day:

"All the fun's in how you say a thing."

(Robert Frost)