From daemon Mon Jun 12 13:45 EDT 1995 Received: from admin.lsa.umich.edu (controversy.admin.lsa.umich.edu [141.211.61.20]) by town.hall.org (8.6.12/941123.08ccg) with ESMTP id NAA17469 for ; Mon, 12 Jun 1995 13:42:05 -0400 Received: from meca.psc.lsa.umich.edu by admin.lsa.umich.edu (8.6.12/2.3) with SMTP id NAA20184; Mon, 12 Jun 1995 13:44:16 -0400 Message-Id: <199506121744.NAA20184@admin.lsa.umich.edu> Date: Mon, 12 Jun 95 13:44:49 -0400 Sender: jlarke@umich.edu From: Jason Larke X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (X11; I; SunOS 4.1.3_U1 sun4m) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: jec@TOWN.HALL.ORG Subject: Freedom for entrepreneurs X-URL: http://www.town.hall.org:80/places/jec/Hearing/index.html Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Length: 1613 Status: RO I was very pleased to hear Sen. Mack refer to this freedom in his opening remarks. I have always believed that the best way to accelerate the growth of the econonomy was to make it easier to individual businessmen to turn a profit, and let those people do what they do best. At the same time, I feel too many people are taking a narrow view of economics without considering the related issues. The right to privacy, and the means of enforcing it, are a vital part of the economy. Nobody wants the entire world to have the ability to monitor their spending habits. Privacy in the information age means international standards for secure encryption of data. Every citizen should be able to encode data so that the intended recipients- in or out of the US- will be the only people who can read it. The current restrictions on cryptography export prevent us from reaching this goal. Mandating that US citizens use only cryptography that our government can break is even worse. National security and economic interests are closely allied. Foreign companies have no interest in sharing their financial data with our government. Limiting the codes used by US companies will only cause them to limit their dealings with US nationals. It will not serve our national security. I realize this is probably not part of your agenda for these meetings. But an economy presumes a reliable way of transferring compensation for each transaction, and that is the point I am speaking to. -- Jason Larke- jlarke@umich.edu- sysadmin, philosophy guy, and Rush fan I don't speak for ITD-LSA or U-M. Send mail for PGP public key.