Re: "What is your strategy to avoid RSACi type systems?"

[Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>]

James Love <love@cptech.org> writes:
>    Tim, on the one hand, you seem to be saying that you have
> constitutional rights, which would make the government's enforcement of
> labeling systems illegal.  On the other hand, you seem to express
> concern that the government will succeed at making such labeling
> mandatory.  I'm not sure which case you believe to be true, or if you
> are still unsure how courts will rule on this issue down the road. 

What about the possibility (gasp) that the government might rush ahead
and do things which were illegal, and unconstitutional?

The US is littered with laws, taxes, court decisions which are clearly
unconstitutional.

The problem is that there is this set of people who like to do a thing
called "compromise", and this leads down a slippery path.  Sooner than
you expect you end up with dietary recommendation laws (ingest a few
non-government approved foodstuffs, find yourself locked up - eg many
drugs), 50% effective taxation even thought the people who wrote the
constitution and federal papers were clearly against this, and it is
also clearly unconstitutional.

Your comments on ratings sound a lot like compromises.

> I doubt that Huck Finn is going to be the defining issue of this
> debate.

True.  But that's what it'll come to long term.  Goverment always
starts from an extreme case.

>          At various points, things are more or less voluntary.  

Are taxes voluntary?  Car insurance?  Driving license?  Dog license?
Not straying from government dietary recommendations?  Not taking
notice of governmental "rating services"?  You can't get much closer
to the first amendment than that last one.

> But when you have endless commercial spamming, or make no effort to
> make it easy to filter porn from k-12 classrooms, then you may end
> up with more rules that you might want.  In this sense, rules will
> be result of a failure to solve problems informally.

Spam has technical solutions.  Charge postage.  Problem solved.  

(Or have a look at hashcash for a temporary solution:

	http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/hashcash/
)

You want government anti-spam laws?

Kids might read porn?  Feh.

Kids watch porn on TV.  Kids look at porn mags from shops, or passed
around at school.  Kids pass porn mags around at school from age 10 or
lower.

Libraries contain all sorts of stuff kids could read which would fail
government "rating services".  So do book stores, newspapers.

>     I think that the cyber porn debate would be more of less ended if
> there was an agreement of the standard meta tag for adult material.

That is an interesting suggestion.  

OK, I agree: you standardize a porn meta-tag.  No requirement to use
it.  Perhaps a few porn sites will even use it to increase their web
hits.  Kids will figure out how to do a web search _for_ adult rated
pages.

However I don't think it would appease the law happy, attention
hungry politicians.

The problem is that you can bet your bottom dollar that the law happy
idiots in government will want to draft shit-loads of laws to back it
up.  Voluntary it won't be.

A basic rule of thumb: don't negotiate, compromise with, vote for, or
talk to politicians, it encourages them, and you will always, always
come out worse off.

Slogan graffittied on a bridge around here:

	"don't vote, it only encourages them"

Rule #2: new laws never, never give you more freedom.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

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