RE: Making the Agora Vanish

[Sampo Syreeni]

On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, James A. Donald wrote:

>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".

I think a more suitable parallel would be to consider how difficult it would
be to ban the use of telephones, especially in a time where few widespread,
consumer visible applications exist.

>Intimidation and censorship suffers from the law of declining returns.
>[...] The same is true of governmental efforts to control cryptography.

Agreed. Not reassured, though...

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front