The founders were a bunch of hippies
by digby
This is an amazing little blast from the past by NSA apologist Stewart Baker. From 1994:
Of course there are people who aren’t prepared to trust the escrow agents, or the courts that issue warrants, or the officials who oversee the system, or anybody else for that matter. Rather than rely on laws to protect us, they say, let’s make wiretapping impossible; then we’ll be safe no matter who gets elected.
This sort of reasoning is the long-delayed revenge of people who couldn’t go to Woodstock because they had too much trig homework. It reflects a wide — and kind of endearing — streak of romantic high-tech anarchism that crops up throughout the computer world.
The problem with all this romanticism is that its most likely beneficiaries are predators. Take for example the campaign to distribute PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”) encryption on the Internet. Some argue that widespread availability of this encryption will help Latvian freedom fighters today and American freedom fighters tomorrow. Well, not quite. Rather, one of the earliest users of PGP was a high-tech pedophile in Santa Clara, California. He used PGP to encrypt files that, police suspect, include a diary of his contacts with susceptible young boys using computer bulletin boards all over the country. “What really bothers me,” says Detective Brian Kennedy of the Sacramento, California, Sheriff’s Department, “is that there could be kids out there who need help badly, but thanks to this encryption, we’ll never reach them.”
If unescrowed encryption becomes ubiquitous, there will be many more stories like this. We can’t afford as a society to protect pedophiles and criminals today just to keep alive the far-fetched notion that some future tyrant will be brought down by guerrillas wearing bandoleers and pocket protectors and sending PGP-encrypted messages to each other across cyberspace.
I think that gets to the heart of the matter, don’t you? Anyone who worries about the idea that the government might abuse its powers in this way are basically hippies and geeks enabling pedophiles in service of some far-fetched notions of “freedom.” Obviously, it’s ridiculous to think the government could ever use these powers against the American people for political reasons.
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