--- Stefan Reich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Question: would you be willing
> to trade your personal privacy for maybe some
> further measure of security
> from terrorists? Would you grant the people running
> Carnivore greater rights
> into your life in order to perhaps prevent more
> events like this? Is the
> encryption export ban such a bad thing when stacked
> against 50,000 people's
> lives?"
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Just as gun
control usually only helps keep guns away from honest
citizens, encryption control would only allow the
government to monitor people who use standard
encryption packages.
You'd have to be a pretty stupid terrorist to use an
encryption protocol that you knew the government had a
back door to. When there are so many that don't have
a back door available from your nearest encryption
textbook, why use one that has a gaping hole in it.
As somebody else pointed out, it's not even necessary
to use encryption, when you can hide messages in
pre-arranged code words.
So to summarize, allowing the government to tap into
my communications will only catch terrorists without
any brains while significantly reducing my ability to
have privacy from the government.
Now if the hypothetical government monitoring could
actually help catch terrorists then I'd be in more of
a moral quandry. While the famous saying "He who
trades freedom for safety deserved neither" comes to
mind, lack of privacy isn't necessarily lack of
freedom. I would probably still object just on the
principle (I don't believe the government has any
business poking into my business), I don't really want
terrorists to be able to kill 5000 people in a fell swoop.
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