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Re: Root Causes Roots
Jim Ray asks what on earth I'm talking about the 9th amendment
not applying to the right to write code, since people were using
codes to protect their communications long before the passage of
the bill of rights.
I always understood "writing code" as in "cypherpuks write code"
to mean computer code, that is FORTRAN, C++, assembler, perl or
whatever. I understand "writing IN code" to be the use of
cryptographic tools such as codes or cyphers. Thus my claim
that the right to write IN code may have existed in the 1790s,
but the right to write [computer] code could not (since there
were no computers). Of course, I could be wrong about this,
since however you define it, it's debateable whether I'd pass the
code test to qualify as a cypherpunk, since I stopped writing
code when I gave up programming for lawyering, and I didn't start
writing in code when I started writing about codes.
In any case it's a matter of definitions, not timelines.
Note: I am not suggesting that the right to write code lacks
constitutional protection; just that the protection wouldn't
come from the 9th amendment. My views on the constitutional
right to write IN code, which also does not rely on the 9th
amendment, can be found in my Clipper paper, which Hal Abelson
has kindly ported in Netscape friendly form to:
http://
--
Michael Froomkin until Aug 6: [email protected]
U.Miami School of Law London, England
[email protected] <-- this will still find me
PO Box 248087 Coral Gables, FL 33124-8087 Rain. Sun. Rain. Sun. Rain.