Re: Big Brother vs. Cypherpunks

[snow <snow@smoke.suba.com>]

Mr. Young posted:
>    Time, October 14, 1996, p. 78.
>    Joshua Quittner
>    Big Brother vs. Cypherpunks

>    Are they right? It's hard to know whom to believe in this
>    cloak-and-dagger debate. Civil libertarians tend to gloss
>    over the fact that the world is full of bad people with
>    crimes to hide. The software industry -- which makes 48%

     No, some of us "Civil libertarians" are well aware that there
are bad people in this world. We just acknowlege that some of these
bad people are IN THE GOVERNMENT, that some of these people are in 
other positions of power, and that the rest of the bad people are 
relatively unlikely to be negatively effected by these schemes. It is 
more likely that the "bad guys" will be positively effected (to OUR 
disadvantage) by forcing us to use bad crypto. If the NSA can 
break the encryption in near real time, then the "bad people" can 
get the tools to do it nearly as fast (sure, it will cost them 
2 or 3 hundred thousand dollars, but they just busted a drug ring 
in one housing project here in chicago that was making that much 
money in a week) Do you know what your privacy is worth? Find out 
how much Amex charges for it's database of your purchasing habits. 
Then think about how much some "bad guy" could make by cracking 
medical or credit information that is being transfered across "The Net".  

Petro, Christopher C.
petro@suba.com <prefered for any non-list stuff>
snow@smoke.suba.com