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Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

With anonymity, I can risk being who I want to be. I can say what I want to say and do what I want to do regardless of what anybody else wants.

Without anonymity, I can't risk being who I want to be, saying what I want to say, doing what I want to do, because someone else might find out and give me trouble.

Encryption should be declared a munition, and get a slot right next to the right to bear arms. Governments shall not infringe on the right of the people to encrypt any data that they use between two parties. This is not a trivial matter, this is the future of the human collective taking form here. Will everything we do be tracked, or will some of it be private?

Here is Eben talking about what he's doing on CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7358702n

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> Encryption should be declared a munition, and get a slot right next to the right to bear arms.

Err, I don't think so, based on the following utilitarian argument:

First, more freedom in the network means more freedom in general. Evidence for this is easy to find. Encryption in particular does one thing and one thing only: preventing eavesdropping. That helps freedom of though, and even of speech (for small groups on a chat room, for instance).

Second, more arms means more dead people (not much, compared to car crashes and ageing, but still). Evidence is even easier to find. And as far as I know, it doesn't increase freedom in any interesting way.

Even beyond my judgement call, it should now be obvious that encryption and ammunitions have very different effects. Using one as an analogy for the other would be wildly inaccurate.

More arms means more dead people? The potential, perhaps, but I don't believe, even though for many years, we kept ramping up more and more nuclear arms, there was more and more nuclear destruction. You might say the presence of those weapons dissuaded another's use of them.

If you really want to make the argument that nuclear weapons haven't been a hugely destructive force, you need to wait until the game has ended. They are still there, and the opportunity for them to generate a lot of dead people to prove you wrong may still arise. That game isn't over yet.

I was talking about firearms owned by private citizens, notably hand guns. Military weaponry is of course easier to control.

Wow. I never thought about anonymity as a requirement for truly free speech before but it totally is.

"Gentlemen don't read each other's mail"

>With anonymity, I can risk being who I want to be. I can say what I want to say and do what I want to do regardless of what anybody else wants.

>Without anonymity, I can't risk being who I want to be, saying what I want to say, doing what I want to do, because someone else might find out and give me trouble.

Yea, I know. Some of the problems can and should be fixed. For example, we need to move away from "legacy" PR based on controlling the message.

Encryption was a munition and it was outlawed for individuals to have it..see PGP history for details

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