From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 01:39:02 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: US Senate bans laptops
Message-ID: <1.5.4.32.19970921171629.0080d4f4@pop.pipeline.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Lucky Green wrote about banning lapdancing on the Senate floor:

Banning laptops continues a long tradition of congressional
resistance to technology, the Senate moreso than the House.

The Architect of the Capitol, an office as well as a person, has 
to deal with a heritage of Luddites who have resisted, as examples,
removal of cuspidors; installing women's facilities of all sorts: 
putting in air-conditioning (mechanical ventilation as well as 
cooling), electric lights, subterranean trams, elevators, smoke 
alarms, telephones!, telegraphs, electro-mechanical quorum 
and roll calls (bells, lights and pagers!), wheelchairs (just 
recently), and more -- virtually every invention has been 
delayed in the Capitol, along with compliance with the laws 
imposed on the country but not on hallowed halls.

Ex-AoCs sometimes leak the stupifying arguments the 
solons make for maintaining their supposedly superior 
lifestyles free of demanding gadgetry and popular fad: 
their preference is for human servants over devices in order
to maintian deniability, for while flesh and blood is what the 
beasts know best how to cajole, seduce and terrorize 
it is also the reason they remain ever ready for betrayal
and opportunistic one-night-stand switching of lifetime fidelity.

Blinking, recording, error-archiving, machines scare the shit 
out of the the fork-tongue power-aphrodisiacal nymphomaniacs, 
not to say that the rest of us would act so differently given a 
seat in inner circles of jerks getting lapdanced on a magic 
carpet -- who wants that in the National Archives of Perfidy?

Often the reason folks oppose new technology is that it threatens
their network of operations based on old technology, as the
case with encryption.

Still, it's worth considering what leaked Senate plaintext 
(gov, pol, illicit)  would induce the secrecy-obsessed senators 
to support strong crypto for their own privacy of stashed 
wealth and squelched Paulas?

Often new technology is resisted because that it threatens
networks of successful operations of barely legal scams based 
on old technology, as the case with encryption, tv, radio, 
telephone, telegraph, printing, highways, roads, trails, stars, 
evil eyes, body stench, intuition, fear, mother's milk, amniotic 
warmth, egg and dart, downhole non-existence.

To be sure, there are disclosures of red-faced liaisons, the sort
recorded in hallowed halls and red-flocked boudoirs, that the 
TLAs (mirroring the KGB) may be threatening Congress with, 
in the eye-opening publications of Kalliste. See:

   http://www.aci.net/kalliste/