At 20:52 17-02-00 , Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>Most people who work for governments are ordinary
>people and not the facist thugs of your bizare fantasies.
Do ~ordinary people~ take their company helicopter and drop a home-made
bomb on a building known to be occupied by ten people, about half of them
children, and when the conflagration is established, order firefighters
away at gunpoint, until several city blocks have been burnt to the ground?
Do ~ordinary people~ shoot a goat herder doing his job? And then get
exemption from prosecution?
Do ~ordinary people~ joy-ride on an airplane, ignore altitude restrictions,
kill twenty people in among the most horrible of imaginable deaths, and
then deliberately destroy the evidence?
Do ~ordinary people~ target a passenger train in their cross-hairs, watch
it cross a rail bridge, and then kill (to further their cause)?
Frankly, at the risk of optimism, I've a lot more confidence in ~ordinary
people~ that what we've been forced to accept from many government employees.
>Most people who work for intelligence agencies are
>pretty normal come to that.
Do you think the CEO of Pepsi or Coke would have their company's most
secret recipes on their home computer, with no security, and have members
of their household casually surf the Web (perhaps per some accounts
visiting ~porn~ sites)? Would their employer consider doing so at best a
minor misconduct? While knowing there is a good chance that
highly-sensitive secrets are revealed, and no way to determine otherwise.
>We all knew that the export control regs. were
>inffective. So how could an ineffective regulation
>be a civil right threat?
There is a difference between being ineffective and being without harm.
It is true that the export control regulations did not have their intended
(or promised) effects. However, they nevertheless have had serious harmful
impact. For example, they distracted Mr. Zimmerman and others from
productive work for a far-from-trivial period of time. For example, they
prevented cell phones from using the type of encryption that would have
easily prevented much of the millions (or is it billions) of ripped-off air
time. And the list goes on.
By way of analogy, it is easy to show that the so-called ~War on Drugs~ has
been ineffective... just look at the relative ease that children have of
getting illicit drugs in many schools now, compared with when it was
instigated. While ineffective, it is easy to find examples of cases where
civil rights have been trampled.
Safe computing, /Harold
ps. Perhaps the biggest difference with government is its ability to force
immunity for what it does, hence being able to do dangerous things (such as
mandating air-bag killing machines) with impunity.
pps. If it is reasonable for the IRS to presume that non-government
waitress get tips, and make them pay taxes unless they can prove to the
contrary, how many Illinois Secretary of State employees need be convicted
of taking bribes before a similar presumption of taxes due should apply to
all such government employees?
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Harold A. Driscoll mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
#include <std/disclaimer> http://Driscoll.Chi.IL.US
