"In the digital era each and every one of us needs to secure his or her personal identity with strong, trusted cryptographic resources, yes, including military-grade technology now scheduled on the Department of Commerce “Munitions List”.
We need to do this …
(a) To protect ourselves and our property from identity theft; …
(b) To assert our individual civil and property rights, without being preyed upon by oppressive government or piratical business agents; …
(c) To add value in all manner of professional and commercial transactions that depend on authentic credentials and reputation; and, …
(d) Yes, to uphold our largely private civic order and complement other, mostly public means, of collective security that, together, make the criminals, insurgents, or terrorists in our midst conspicuous, unsafe, and unbalanced -- not you or me.
Political extremists love to present the public and private, the individual and collective, order and disorder in stark, radical, and simple rhetorical, even Manichean, terms, as if we have to choose one over the other. Those are false choices offered by those as would steal your and my freedom of action. Such people love to claim “everything has changed!” meaning they want to repudiate something we might hold dear."
He goes on to attack the Texas incantation of the Help America Vote intitiative, which he describes as the latest excuse to build a " giant, centralized, database for near real-time political-economic surveillance of everybody in this country, everywhere, all the time."
Read the whole thing. I nearly didn't because I intially thought it was a "gun-nut" (as Berhman describes another friend) sounding off. You may or may not agree with him but he'll make you stop and think.
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