Re: Electronic locksmiths are watching you (Belgium's ban onPGP)

[Dave Del Torto <ddt@lsd.com>]

At 1:25 am 3/30/96, jim bell wrote:
[elided]
>I think it's obvious that governments around the world have a very poor
>record of responding "well" to encryption with any kind of acceptable
>legislation.  Arguably, laws should exist for the benefit of the public, but
>what's happening is that governments are using their authority to try to
>restrain the political consequences of technical developments.  I see no
>benefit to the public in laws against encryption, and certainly no net
>benefit.
>
>We should be particularly suspicious of any hint of a pan-European ban or
>control of encryption, because that is exactly the kind of development that
>could usher in a secretly-negotiated treaty that might be argued to be
>binding on the public.               [elided]

IMHO, this represents a very America-centric, and a rather innacurate, view
of the world. Sure, we live in a great country in many ways. Sure, we still
enjoy many priviledges, such as owning and using strong crypto. In point of
fact, though, the US is by far the most "behind" country in the wired world
as far as Privacy protections and legislation.

In New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Nederlands, Taiwan, Hungary, most of the EC,
there is a well-defined privacy policy that protects - proactively - the
citizens from intrusive practives by government. Only here in the US do we
suffer under proposed/pending/established legislation such as the CDA. One
might argue that the few loopholes that the other nations allow for
"violations" of personal privacy are egregious (national security, etc),
but they represent the real-world concerns of governments not so
"insulated" by geography, etc as the US. The charge of "restraint" IMHO is
premature, and is more of a projection (in the psych sense) than a reality.

Canada, I've learned here at CFP, has defined a progressive national
privacy policy that proactively protects people -- where we do not
implicitly -- against "processing" of personal data for any purpose other
than a "specific use for which it was gathered. Does the US have such a
p-p-policy? No. Can you argue that other protections in place under the US
Constitution already cover those areas? You could, but there are so many
holes in that argument, and so much is yet to be done by the FTC, that we
now have the phenomenon of "toy" companies putting out 5-page survey web
pages for 5-year-olds that ask what careers they plan and what shoes they
wear. Amazing. I would not argue that myself.

Cypherpunks like Jim need to keep doing their homework before they make
such quasi-factual statements.

   dave