From: Hallam-Baker <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 10:13:18 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Stop the presses -- Anti-terrorism bill not that bad
In-Reply-To: <4u3255$si2@life.ai.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <32053E44.2781@ai.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Oh dear oh dear....

First off people on cypherpunks seem to have the idea that the type
of people who go blasting peoples heads off have brains. Without
wanting to inflate people's egos too much the average reader of
cypherpunks is an awful lot smarter than your average criminal. 

Fancy plans to disolve gun barrels etc are way too complex for 
your average criminal and in any case it is substantially easier
to drop a gun in a lake or the sea and less likely to result in
incrimination than to try disolving it, run 200 rounds through
it or whatever.


Vacuming up powder left over from a rifle range would not help
very much. One of the problems of building a bomb is to make 
sure that all the explosive goes off. A gas chromatograph is 
able to differentiate spent and unspent explosive. It would be 
easier to go off and buy the stuff from multiple sources or
to make ones own explosive from nitrates with oxidants.

I would expect that anyone vacuming up the residue from a gun
club is likely to have difficulty explaining what he is doing.
After all one does not usually go off to play Rambo, then stick
an apron on and start doing the housework.


I personally think that tagants is an insuffieicent approach to
the problem. Given the number of gun related homicides in the
US it is not unreasonable to require each individual cartridge
to be stamped with a serial number and for gun dealers to be 
required to record each individual purchase. That at least 
was my advice to the UK govt after Dunblane. 

If people go arround claiming that ownership of guns is necessary
so that people can commit acts of treason against the US govt
then it is inevitable that there will be pressure for greater
regulation. The NRA has been playing a bad hand stupidly. By
raising the militia argument they have played into the hands
of abolitionists. It would be entirely foolish for the crypto
lobby to allow themselves to be tied to the NRA. The NRA has
no choice but to support civil liberties, there is no reason
why the wider civil liberties movement needs to support the
NRA.


More significant for crypto  policy is the recent revelations 
about US spying on the European Union by spoofing CISCO routers
via SNMP. That act should be exploited to drive a wedge between
US attempts to bar use of cryptographic security systems and
the members of the EU.


		Phill