Re: Federal motivation

[Martin Minow <minow@apple.com>]

Anonymous, signing as Monty Cantsin, Editor in Chief of Smile Magazine
quotes my Cypherpunks summary's quote of Eric Hughes:
>Martin Minow wrote:
>> EH: Why do the Fed's want access to plaintext? The motivation has
>> not been made clear. Policy goals are stated in technological terms,
>> not in policy terms.
>
>Perhaps we can elaborate on this.  Judging from their actions, what
>they want is a full blown police state.  They've seen the product, now
>they want one of their own.  This is obvious to everybody on this
>list, but sometimes people are coy about it, probably in an effort to
>appear to be "legitimate".
>

Sorry, it isn't obvious to me. The most paranoid I can work myself
up to is to assume that some (not all) of our leaders want to restore
their half-remembered 1950's Dick-and-Jane, big car, Eisenhauer suburbian
childhood; and are afraid that letting absolute privacy loose will
be the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it. This parallels the battles
that were waged in the early 1960's, as the civil rights movement
(and the Pill) shattered the myth of suburbia. The police and FBI
felt, quite sincerely, that they were in the midst of a revolution
and had to take "necessary measures" to save America.

The new cryptography makes the Internet safe for child pornographers,
for revolutionaries, for criminals, as well as for human rights
workers, for religious missionaries in unfriendly countries, and
multinational corporations. The message I read from the attempt
to criminalize strong cryptography is that the risk of damage
from the pornographers (etc.) is so great that we must restrict
cryptography and trust the national leadership to respect the
rights of the good guys. Unfortunately, one country's human
rights worker is another country's dangerous revolutionary.

Remember, the Martin Luther King who was thrown in jail in Alabama
in the early 1960's was the same Martin Luther Kings who received
the Nobel Peace Prize a few years later, and who was killed for
his revolutionary activities just a few years after that. Whether
he was a hero or villian depends on who writes the history book
and it is, ultimately, our responsibility to make sure that many,
conflicting, history books can be written.

Martin Minow
minow@apple.com