From: stewarts@ix.netcom.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 95 01:30:35 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: A Chronology on crypto bans
Message-ID: <199507170827.BAA12430@ix6.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 04:08 PM 7/16/95 -0400, Dave Banisar wrote:
>Someone asked why is there such a flurry recently on banning crypto in
>recent months. This is not a recent issue. There have been almost non-stop
>attempts for the last 15 years.

True, though there have been more and louder calls for banning crypto as
it becomes more widely used, and as the Internet and electronic commerce
make its use more relevant.  The number of cats running around outside of bags
has been increasing, so the effort of the politicians to herd them back in
has become more and more noticeable.  

A lot of it has been good public relations but the Good Guys as well -
back in the late 70s, when I started following it, crypto was mostly for spooks,
bankers, and academic math nerds*; PGP and the government's persecution of Phil
have made a lot of people aware that the stakes are high and the Bad Guys
are serious, 
and the Clipper Chip sounded enough like "The Feds want to tap my phone"
that the general public could understand, a bit, that this was something
that affected them...

It's also been technology - real crypto needs computers, and computers have
gone from million-dollar room-fillers that you might use at work or university
to appliances you can buy at WalMart, like tv sets, which your kids use for
school,
if you don't count game machines, which your kids can buy at K-mart...
Suddenly a third of the country's got a machine they can do real crypto on,
and for 10 bucks a month they can be on a world-wide email network.
And it's mostly the _rich_ third of the country, who might want to do their
home banking somewhere a bit less taxing than before.

Oh, yeah, there's also drugs - folks might want to use the Home Shopping
Internet
for more than just fake jewelry :-)

* at the time, I was an academic math nerd designing banking networks
at the phone company, and my department also did studies for spooks...
#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com