From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 1996 14:53:10 +0800
To: Alex Strasheim <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: NSA says strong crypto to China?
Message-ID: <199601080625.WAA21243@blob.best.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 03:23 PM 1/7/96 -0600, Alex Strasheim wrote:
> But I don't necessarily look at the
> NSA as an enemy.  Right now we're on opposite sides of an important issue,
> and I think they're doing a lot of damage.  But I tend to think that they
> believe what they're doing is in the national interest.  They're trying 
> to defend democracy -- our democracy, at least.

I see no sign that NSA is capable of distinguishing between the 
interest of the state and the interest of the nation.

It is perfectly clear that the threat that NSA is primarily 
concerned with comes from within, not from without.

> So the question we ought to be putting to the NSA is this:  isn't it in
> the best interest of the United States and the other capitalist Western
> democracies to impose the first ammendment on the rest of the world? 

There is this big myth, spread partly by the US government, 
and partly by the radical left, notably Chomsky, that the 
US has been protecting the world against socialism:  This 
is a load of old bananas.  The US government has been 
pro socialist -- not as pro socialist as the IMF, and the 
IMF has not been as pro socialist as the Soviets -- but the 
US has still been shoving socialism down peoples throats in a 
heavy handed way, because they could get away with that 
kind of stuff abroad, when they cop hell for it at home.

The nastiest piece of socialism was arguably the land reform
scheme in El Salvador, which converted the peasants from
tenants of a few powerful rural landlords, to serfs on state
run collective farms.  This screwed up agriculture big time,
and the peasants detested it.

If you want to use land reform to make peasants into anti 
communists, you use the method so successfully used in Taiwan.  
You make it possible for the peasant to buy land, and 
encourage him to buy land, and once he has some land of 
his own, and has sacrificed in order to obtain it, you can 
then trust him to resist communism.  If there are communist 
guerrillas around, you should give him a shotgun.

The US government followed a very different strategy in 
El Salvador, from which we may conclude that just as the 
South Vietnamese government considered that robbing
the Montagnards, and rendering them powerless and afraid 
was more important than resisting North Vietnamese communism, 
the US government similarly considered that suppressing private 
property, was more important than resisting communist 
infiltration in El Salvador.

El Salvador was vulnerable to communism because only two hundred
families owned everything worth owning.   If you want to prevent
communism the kind of land reform you need is land reform that
allows more people to acquire individual property rights.

> I don't think the NSA is out to suppress our liberties.  
> [...] it is a mistake to think of them as evil, as people who 
> will tell any lie to get what they want.

I disagree.

Two government officials, one of whom is a communist, have 
more in common than two communists, one of whom is a government 
official.  The NSA is on the same side as the Chinese government,
and if Chinese dissidents used crypto with US GAK, this information
would be exchanged with the Chinese government.

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
              				|  
We have the right to defend ourselves	|   http://www.jim.com/jamesd/
and our property, because of the kind	|  
of animals that we are. True law	|   James A. Donald
derives from this right, not from the	|  
arbitrary power of the state.		|   jamesd@echeque.com