On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 at 12:18:52AM +0000, David Wagner wrote: > Declan McCullagh wrote: > >Also epic.org (not a cypherpunk-friendly organization, > >but it does try to limit law enforcement surveillance) [...] > > Is the cypherpunks movement truly so radicalized that it is > not willing to count even EPIC among its friends?
Perhaps I was being unfair to EPIC and typing too quickly. I count EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg as a friend, a principled person, and someone for whom I have a great deal of respect. Some folks may remember that Marc and I drove to a cypherpunks meeting south of Palo Alto last year. EPIC is in favor of using technologies to limit the information that people disclose. It is in favor of limiting law enforcement surveillance. It has done yeoman's work in strengthening FOIA, fighting against encryption regulations, and supporting free speech in the form of being co-counsel on the CDA and COPA challenges, for starters. Those are all congruent with the views of many cyherpunks, as I understand them. But EPIC sharply diverges with some cypherpunks over the question of what regulations should be imposed on private entities. It supports -- may even be the most vocal supporter -- of laws telling you, in Tim's words, you must forget someone's previous commercial interactions with you past a certain date. It supports broad and intrusive regulations aimed at companies' data collection and use practices. It would like to establish a European-style (not exactly the same, perhaps, but close) "data protection" regime in the U.S., despite all the free speech problems we've seen with it in Europe: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=palme To the extent cypherpunks care about those values and cherish limited government involvement in those areas, EPIC is not, as I wrote, a "cypherpunk-friendly" organization. Also, I haven't thought this through that much, but it seems to me that if you value privacy _qua_ privacy as an end goal, it makes sense to start looking at not the symptoms, but the cause: Large government that consumes perhaps nearly half of the GDP is necessarily privacy-invasive. There are even some reasonable justifications for it: Social Security creates an SSN to limit fraud. The IRS collects an incredible amount of detail to limit tax cheating. If you want gun control, you'll probably want to collect info on gun owners. Anyone who values privacy as an end goal (Jim Harper of privacilla has written about this too) should start questioning the trappings of the welfare state and find alternatives. Could Social Security be privatized? Could we move to a flat tax or sales tax, or even (gasp) reduce taxes? EPIC is a left-of-center civil liberties group and it does not ask those questions, to the best of my knowledge. I suspect the majority of folks at EPIC support UK-ish gun control, which explains why the group has never made a point of highlighting the privacy problems of some of the state and federal anti-gun laws. This does not mean EPIC isn't a valuable ally -- it is and will continue to be -- but perhaps only on an issue-by-issue basis. -Declan
