On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 08:01:08PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
>
> And software-defined radios, which are now coming from at least two
> sources, will make this even easier. Indeed, "trespassing" into the Big
> Brother-owned frequencies will be even easier.
>
> We may even see SDRs outlawed from the outset as "terrorist tools."
>
> (Inasmuch as tuning an SDR is nothing more than entering numbers, or
> running simple programs, we may also see "coding as speech" arguments
> resurrected. All for naught, though, as Camp Liberty in Guantanamo Bay
> has room for 12,000 more Thought Criminals.)
>
Rumor has it that the ECPA hobby listening penalty increase in
the CSEA was, surprisingly, not originated by the House Republicans
burned by the intercept of the Newt call or by cellphone lobbyists tying
to save money on encryption but by the Bush Justice Department.
The DOJ is supposed to have asked for the added penalties
as an addition to the original CSEA.
This is an interesting turnabout from their attitude back in
1985 when the ECPA was being crafted when they described such
restrictions as unenforcable and something they didn't want to deal
with.
Whilst hardly (understatement of the year) a Washington insider,
I would speculate that perhaps someone in the DOJ has gotten concerned
about recent white hat hacker projects like gru-radio and takes
the potential threat from bright hackers with IQs 40-60 or more points
over the scanner crowd far more seriously than some truck driver
with a modified Radio Shack scanner.
And I am on record as advising some of the folks doing gnu-radio
that in my personal opinion it was rather unlikely that a user
programmable open source software radio would ever get FCC approval or
be legally sold in the USA under current regulations on scanning radio
receivers. So I share Tim's assessment about the likelyhood of such
being banned or tightly restricted, though it seems hard to see how they
can be kept out of the hands of hams for use on ham bands (and more such
ham projects appear every day).
--
Dave Emery N1PRE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass.
PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2 5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18
