Re: NSA says strong crypto to China?

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

On Sun, 7 Jan 1996, James A. Donald wrote:

> 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.

Agreed. They're a bureaucracy and a statist entity. But states are 
distinct and antagonistic entities. There's no world government.

As someone who worked with Terry Karl in El Salvador, I also think your
Central American history is a bit off, but that's off topic, and normal
for the US. Agreed that Chomsky is usually rather weak on the facts, which
is why he is seldom cited in academic journals; he's really just a darling
of the press, because the man exudes eggheadedness and erudite sarcasm. He
never should have strayed from developmental linguistics. 

> 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.

I don't see this happening.

The NSA is logically allied with other organizations of greater
repressiveness, inasmuch as it is not really in the interest of the NSA to
pursue absolute freedom anywhere. Certainly they have no desire for anyone
in the world to enjoy privacy. However, this logical symmetry does not
translate to practical collaboration. You think the NSA and the Chinese
government trust each other at all? They're spying on each other.

One certainly observes strange bedfellow situations among three letter
agencies (the Iran/Contra affair; Cuban and South African aiding of
insurgents of every political stripe; US intelligence information on Iran
provided to Iraq); but one also observes strange conflicts (the Pollard
affair, Israel's spying on the US; back to Dreyfuss; intrigue within the
EC). 

-rich