Word: argumentation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Historically, the U.S. has restricted exports of encryption to foreign countries. It is currently illegal to export encryption products beyond a certain strength without giving the government a key, a system known as "key escrow." Encryption has been classified as a type of munitions, a tool of war. The argument was that if terrorists, organized crime networks or other unpleasant people got their hands on powerful encryption software, they could encode their plans in a way that the CIA and the FBI couldn't understand...
...Such an argument would make sense if the U.S. were the only country that had invented codes. Like the atom bomb and the secret of fire, however, this technology long ago fell into foreign hands. In most countries, there are few restrictions on encryption's use, manufacture or sale. RSA Inc., which makes a widely-used encryption engine, has opened an Australian subsidiary which can sell its technology world-wide. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) has estimated that U.S. companies are forced to stand by and lose $60 billion a year of revenues as foreign competitors, unbound by export restrictions...
...that the government doesn't trust its citizens to communicate privately, Imagine what the House Un-American Activities Committee might have done in a country where most communication was electronic and the government always had a key. Applying the principle to other means of communication makes the administration's argument seem ludicrous. Think how many criminals have communicated by word of mouth: why don't we force everyone to wear a hidden microphone? Apparently, law-abiding citizens would never object to having other people listen to what they say-unless they needed to hide something...
Slavitt and Marini tried to minimize the potential dangers of procedural error. They rested their main argument on the grounds that in some cases, allowing certain prisoners to live amounts to an even greater injustice...
...realize that this argument will no be terribly well received by certain over-achieving juniors and precocious sophomores, not to mention first-semester seniors who entered with the graduating class; and I would probably have objected to it a year ago. But nobody ever said veritas was pretty...