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Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

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Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government i…

I think it's unfortunate to leap from the right to privacy to the right bear arms. These are both good topics for debate and I actually support gun rights but they are different, large questions and this leap is effectively a thread derail.

On the other hand, some types of cryptography are classified as weapons by the US government.

But I do favor a 1st amendment view of "right to cryptography" rather than a 2nd amendment view of it.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government i…

> Take the right to bear arms as an example. In most other nations, if it exists, this is a right granted by government to the people. In the US this is a right recognized by the constitution to exist despite and outside of government. In the US, the “right to bear arms” is a right to own a weapon as part of a “well-regulated militia”, with the idea that the nation was not originally intended to have a standing army,…

Well, you are wrong. That is, unless you are a constitutional scholar with powers the supersede those of the US Supreme Court.

In "Heller" (2008), as the case is generally known, the US Supreme Court explored the history of the Second Amendment and established that it creates an INDIVIDUAL right not linked to a militia or army. This was confirmed once again by the US Supreme Court in another case in 2010.

There's a popular meme that involves cutting-up pieces of the Second Amendment to pull out, as you did, "right to bear arms" and "well-regulated militia" and then, Bob's your uncle, you can't have a gun. Everyone is a constitutional scholar. Well, that's not how it works.

While IANAL, I understand that these things are the result of a process of legal challenges and a lot of historical context. This question of the individual right is now very well established with, as far as I can tell, just a few corner cases. Thankfully laws are not interpreted by random people behind keyboards at random locations on the internet. They are the result of years of legal process, challenges and interpretation. The law, as it stands today, says you are wrong.

In other words, it is pretty much nonsensical to keep trying to contort the language and claim something exactly opposite what the US Supreme Court concluded in more than one recent review of the matter.

Here's a good article on the matter from Cornell Law School:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/second_amendment

I have a lot of friends who are very passionate and well informed about this stuff. I've learned quite a bit over the years through conversations with them. For the most part what I have learned is that most people don't know what they are talking about when it comes to the US Constitution, the legal system, how government works and even what their rights actually mean.

It's a failure of, at a minimum, our educational system and, at the modern extremes, our inability to prevent the dissemination of false information. That's how you get ideas such as the "assault weapons ban" when any objective observer can easily --within 15 minutes or less-- of looking at the data, conclude that's as dumb as clipping your toe nails to cure cancer.

Solutions are only found if we explore reality, not fantasy.

In other words, nation-wide gun bans and confiscations are not the realm of reality. Therefore, it is pointless to go on and on about this nonsense. If we want to truly have an effect on gun violence we need to stop focusing on fantasy and face reality, which includes bad guys with guns and mentally disturbed guys with guns. The vast majority, the overwhelming majority of firearm owners would never hurt anyone. They are not the problem.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#83
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's unfortunate to leap from the right to privacy to the right bear arms. These are both good topics for debate and I actually support gun rights but they are different, large questions and this leap is effectively a thread derail.

They are more intertwined than you think. What is gun control but the government asserting a right to pierce your privacy to the putative end of arms control? People don't look at it that way because people are used to looking at X and calling it X, Y and calling it Y, but not realizing both X and Y are subtypes of Z, so chipping away at X is chipping away at Z, even if you want to swear up and down the street it's o…

You and I have a natural right to self-defense, I don't know that you or I have a natural right to firearms.

I'm a firearms owner and I love to hunt but I am not sure that people have a natural right to firearms, and from observation many people should not possess them due to personal negligence surrounding the awesome responsibilities attendant with firearms usage/mis-usage.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT > This is semantically vacuous verbiage. Rights have no meaning unless you have a system of human organization (e.g. a government) that allows those rights to be enforced and respected. The OP is clearly being sloppy with their word usage (and their all-caps usage), but I think what they may…

> all people inherently born free All people are born vulnerable to being beaten up and coerced by the guy with the biggest club. There is no "inherent" freedom in nature.

> All people are born vulnerable to being beaten up and coerced by the guy with the biggest club. There is no "inherent" freedom in nature.

Sure there is! You are not prevented from grabbing a stick and defending yourself by some artifice. You might lose. Or win. And you are free to make that choice.

In CA if someone comes at me with a baseball bat and I have two sticks tied together with a short piece of rope to defend myself I can end-up in jail. I once asked a police officer friend (LAPD Commander, actually) what I could legally carry in Los Angeles to defend myself and not get into trouble. He said "your best pair of running shoes".

The whole thing is preposterous. What ends-up happening is that lots of people secretly conceal-carry because they don't want to be victims. They do the math and conclude they rather go to jail than be dead. Truly sad.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government i…

I think it's unfortunate to leap from the right to privacy to the right bear arms. These are both good topics for debate and I actually support gun rights but they are different, large questions and this leap is effectively a thread derail.

He clearly said 'bare arms' which is all about t-shirts and the rolling-up of sleeves, not citizens buying military assault weapons.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#86

Go through each of the Bill of Rights, and for each produce a scenario where that right would be used by a criminal to protect him or her from planning, executing, and avoiding detection of a crime. All individual rights are carved out from the default government, which is the one that takes absolute authority over all within its domain. North Korea is closest to this ideal today, but most vanilla monarchies were lik…

> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government i…

To paraphrase George Carlin here: Google Japanese Americans in WW2 and then tell us again that you have rights the government can't take away.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#87

Go through each of the Bill of Rights, and for each produce a scenario where that right would be used by a criminal to protect him or her from planning, executing, and avoiding detection of a crime. All individual rights are carved out from the default government, which is the one that takes absolute authority over all within its domain. North Korea is closest to this ideal today, but most vanilla monarchies were lik…

Amendment 3 is pretty tough.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"State and local governments had outlawed alcohol since the founding." That's because the scope of state power is very wide in the Constitution. The federal government is much more constrained (or was intended to be), and outlawing alcohol with an act of Congress would be a violation of the 10th Amendment. Interestingly, even the 1st Amendment did not originally prevent states from infringing on the freedom of speech…

> The federal government is much more constrained (or was intended to be), and outlawing alcohol with an act of Congress would be a violation of the 10th Amendment. Commerce clause, among others. There are all kinds of federal regulations and bans that have been upheld as constitutional. Claiming that they aren't really is wishful, not legal, thinking. > Interestingly, even the 1st Amendment did not originally preven…

They said “originally”, i.e. before the 14th Amendment, which contains the due process clause.

Edit: There’s also a “due process” clause in the Fifth Amendment, but it’s not the one used for incorporation (although it’s been used for so-called “reverse incorporation”).

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#89

Go through each of the Bill of Rights, and for each produce a scenario where that right would be used by a criminal to protect him or her from planning, executing, and avoiding detection of a crime. All individual rights are carved out from the default government, which is the one that takes absolute authority over all within its domain. North Korea is closest to this ideal today, but most vanilla monarchies were lik…

> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government i…

It is unfortunate that Americans always propagate the story that the US system is still special, but I guess the thought is part of the self-image ("we are the greatest country in the world") . It's not 1788 anymore. Yes at the time the US constitution was special, but the world moved on and many countries took inspiration from the US constitution. Generally human rights (as for example defined by the UN declaration of human rights) are considered universal or natural rights and are enshrined like that in the laws and regulations of many countries.

That said, that does not mean we (or governments) do not regulate the rights, take your example of right to bear arms, you are not allowed to bear nuclear arms, or rocket launchers, so there is regulation.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government i…

To paraphrase George Carlin here: Google Japanese Americans in WW2 and then tell us again that you have rights the government can't take away.

What is the takeaway here? The government has done a lot of terrible things against its own people, especially when it thinks it’s making decisions “for the greater good”

If anything that’s more of an argument for constitutional gun ownership than against it.

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