The things that defined W’s presidency are still there: Gitmo, the PATRIOT Act, undeclared wars, insane HLS policies, insane TSA policies, telecom backroom deals, Haliburton military contracts, Blackwater operatives on our payroll.

The only differences I’ve seen is a reduction in employment, a housing bubble burst, an expansion of government control, increased spending and hot air that actually makes grammatical sense. Oh and he’s put a gun to the heads of the insurance companies to provide insurance regardless of whether or not it makes fiscal sense and a gun to ours to purchase insurance whether or not we want it.

I understand that we need government. I don’t trust the government’s opinion of how much government we need. Case in point: exactly this type of bullshit. Yes, it would make the justice department’s task much easier and more effective if they had the power to eavesdrop on all communications. No, they should not be trusted with that power because it WILL be abused. Is that too complicated? I don’t know.

As for your other comment and brianary’s, banks and online purchasing will be legally required to add backdoors into their encryption methods as per the terms of this bill. I was explicitly talking about self-encryption, because anything else would already be a lost cause.

No. No I do not. However it’s a trick question – we didn’t give them this power, they inherited it from 200 years of assholes just like them incrementally chipping away at our rights to pave the road to hell. Oh sure there’ve been some consolations like suffrage and other civlib bones we;ve been tossed, but at the same time gun rights have been eroded, fantastic consciousness expanders have been banned. we haven’t declared war wince WWII, yet how many countries have our guys boots tread on since then?

talk shit about my government but dont implicate ME in how they came to wield such a fucked amount of power so wrongly.

No human is illegal.

The most secure encryption method is the one-time-pad. Public/Private key encryption is useful for exchanging keys — and thus messages — over an unsecured channel; It’s far more secure for each party to have (for example) a same-printing same-edition New World Encyclopedia as a shared key matrix, or printed tables of logarithms, or regional property values, or the intervals of a thick-soled-boot-wearing stomper, or the digital values of the nth sector of a Riverdance CD. No eavesdropper can ever get or know the key without seizing one end or the other in the act.

It’s an idea – one that will recur and be independently arrived at no matter how draconian the government becomes in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle.

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/05/because-we-trust-kyle-and-monica-more.html

Yeah, right, “let’s all vote Republicans into power again, ’cause Obama hasn’t done well enough, fast enough, to change America for the better, over the past twenty months”…what nonsense.

Quite a departure than the previous DOJ actually, Mr. Hassenpfeffer.

As for my “frothing at the mouth,” look at the archive of Scott Horton’s blog at http://harpers.org/subjects/NoComment. The DOJ has been poisoned for the past decade.

‘“They can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text.” ‘

I have no intention of voting Republican next month or, barring massive brain trauma, at any time in the future, barring massive brain trauma, but DOJ has traditionally been as apolitical an organization as possible under even the most toxic administrations, and Obama has not only not done anything to reverse the damage inflicted by Dubya/Cheney/Goldsmith, he’s extended the damage, albeit at a slower rate.

> In defense of the Obama administration, in this regard they’re not trying to be evil and totalitarian.

That’s a defense?

Passing pointless laws – that is, unenforceable laws – is one thing that no State can long afford to do. If, that is, it wishes to maintain its credit in and with the world.

If we outlaw cryptography, then only the outlaws with have cryptography.

Anyone willing to make me much smarter?

why would you punch a hole in your roof for one person and think it would be safe from others trying to sneak a peek

So…an argument to actually increase the pay of civil servants, it seems to me.
Even though the argument seems to start by wanting to slag them as being susceptible to venality and corruption (unlike the vast majority of tax-payers, righto).

And this is not a grab for “new powers” per se, but an attempt to hold onto and extend the old powers already secured by law to the lawful elected Government, to extend to, or to encompass, the new media of communications which have arisen. Of course, this may require that, technically, they gain some new powers…but I can see the argument they’re making.

So…who gets to use the x-ray spectacles next?

2) Cryptography is a branch of mathematics and therefore falls into the category of “the laws of nature”. It pretty pointless trying to rewrite the laws of nature, and tends to result in disappointment and embarassment for those who try.

Do the FBI think they can, on a global level, prevent distribution of encryption source code or the study of a branch of mathematics? The phrase “pissing into the wind” springs to mind.

Two wrongs don’t make a right.
That old saw too has some justice in it.

The thing is, keeping secrets or confidences from the Government’s knowledge may be of limited, or more often still, of no concern at all to those who use strong encryption in their day-to-day business. Typically, it’s parties other than one’s own Government whom you are protecting your data against.

Nutbastard: Well, one man’s vote can mean little (but never nothing!) in a democratic society of 350 millions.
Nevertheless, both Canada and the USA are constitutional democracies: and thus, the people as a mass ARE responsible for the Government which they elect – for the Government is responsible solely to them. As you know, in our systems the way to be rid of a bad government is not through violent revolt, but through active political engagement.
IMHO, this is necessarily so, wherever Government is not imposed by some armed force.

It is your – our – Government.
Get organized and engaged with the people involved in politics, if you want to change the steps in the “dance” or the “tune” they’re dancing to.
That is, if you don’t think or feel that it is your Government, then take the steps which are available to you to make it your Government.

Be or become politically involved. That is not a choice which is open to the citizens (or more usually the subjects) of every State, and seems historically to be quite rare.

But it damn well is in ours.