[2710] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Secure Office
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kathleen Ellis)
Fri May 15 19:43:10 1998
In-Reply-To: <010001bd7f91$cd7e16a0$8e33a2cd@siddhartha.communities.com>
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 12:13:28 -0400
To: "Sidney Markowitz" <sidney@communities.com>
From: Kathleen Ellis <ellis@epic.org>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
>I've been biting my tongue on this, but it seems to be snowballing and I
>have to speak up...
>
>My understanding of a civil disobedience action is that it is supposed to
>either bog down the resources of the government making enforcement difficult
>(e.g., thousands of people blocking the street or protesters chaining
>themselves together across the building steps) or elicit an egregious
>response from the government that will win the sympathy of the public and
>lead to mass protest (e.g., a sweet old lady sitting at the front of the bus
>and being dragged off by police).
>
>Placing Secure Office on a thousand servers does not force the government to
>allocate lots of resources to arrest everyone nor to do anything else that
>will garner public sympathy for the cause. All they have to do is proceed
>with the prosecution of the author for his own violation of the law. If
>necessary they can then select the next most visible violation or even pick
>a few at random to prosecute.
>
>I am sympathetic, but I fail to see the point of the action.
Here's why I'm doing it:
- The issue of whether or not to restrict exports of cryptographic software
becomes more and more moot as it becomes increasingly obvious that even if
the government doesn't like it when people disseminate and use encryption,
there's still nothing they can do about it. They simply cannot enforce
these export controls, no matter how hard they try. If they go with the
'select a few at random and burn them at the stake' strategy, they still
have not accomplished their goal. There's a world of difference between a
few people in the US distributing crypto and zero people doing it. If they
have a situation where n > 0, they essentially haven't gotten anywhere.
This doesn't change Mr. Booher's position much, but in the long-term this
realization will affect court decisions and legislation down the line. I
work in Washington, so I'm inclined to think in these terms.
- I think there is potential for the generation of both publicity for the
issue and public sympathy directed towards Booher. Booher's just doing
what everybody on the net does; he wrote some code and decided to
distribute it from his web page. Phil Zimmerman was never even indicted,
and he got a lot of attention AND sympathy.
- I have less to lose than most people, so I might as well go ahead and do
this. I don't have children, I don't own any material assets to speak of.
Being nobody, I don't have a reputation to uphold. I've already got
enough bad things on record that my once-promising future as a Supreme
Court Justice is pretty well shot.
- It makes me feel like a badass, and it takes virtually no work. The
'personal effort invested : amount of fun I'm having with this' ratio here
is very good.
At any rate, this whole thing will probably amount to nothing; Booher will
get a stern talking to from the BXA, and he'll act accordingly as he sees
fit, and then I'll do what I want to do, and so will everybody else.
<disclaimer>
By the way, I speak for myself. I'm not representing EPIC in this. This
just happens to be the email account subscribed to this particular mailing
list.
</disclaimer>
-K
