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At 10:31 PM 4/20/2001 +0300, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
> What I'm really saying is, if one is an advocate of anonymity, one
> now has to plan for a climate where protocols cannot be widely
> published, all secure communications have to be deniable as well,
> crypto advocacy is no longer perceived as an eccentricity, but a
> threat comparable to terrorism, and all public communication can be
> monitored and at the very least partially analyzed.
When I visited Cuba, I found that all the telephones accessible to an
ordinary cuban, or at least all the ones that I encountered, had a man with
a gun nearby, conspicuously visible to the person making the call, and in
one case someone with headphones listening in on the call, conspicuously
visible to the person making the call.
Presumably the Cuban government found it very difficult to deter people
from "spreading rumors".
Intimidation and censorship suffers from the law of declining returns.
Quite modest intimidation has been largely sufficient to keep most people,
including myself, from discussing the Jim Bell case. Much more extreme
forms of intimidation would be necessary to keep it substantially secret.
The same is true of governmental efforts to control cryptography.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
9kBN/XF1IN27cc4V7eyM5Sip2mPvE7N6ZB76yBwl
440mqJg+K49xXPUTTBogXK43gKyFBdftjVCvfpGaj
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We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ James A. Donald
