Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

> This argument is pointless. No government has jurisdiction over the laws of mathematics. No government can prevent encryption. No government can keep people from layering their own encryption over whatever flawed system the government mandates.

While I think there are significant arguments against encryption, this one doesn't make sense to me because laws can stop widespread usage even if they cannot eliminate it. I would draw a comparison to other forms of illegal data that even today cannot be stopped, but which have resulted in far less usage and industrial support.

> No, it isn’t, in a country of laws these things have weight and meaning.

What is your point? Even if noone cares about what that piece of paper says, it still has "weight and meaning"? Or are you just repeating what I said using slightly different words, i.e., in a country where people care about what that piece of paper says, what that piece of paper says has weight and meaning?

> If, on the other hand, we are talking about complete anarchy and the end of laws as our guiding principles then, yes, sure, in that case words on paper do not matter. Until then...

So ... a dictatorship is complete anarchy then? Or are you saying that it is inherently impossible for a government to selectively ignore individual laws or sections of the law? Or is it just yet another rephrasing of what I said, i.e., only if sufficiently many people act to recognize, demand, and enforce the rights, will there be rights?

Rather than just repeat a political line, can you please go deeper? Areas where you cpuld potentially add to the discussion:

* What are the numbers behind the statement?

* What policy proposals do you favor and how do you expect them to influence these numbers over what timeframe? What do you expect the side effects to be?

* Help put policies and numbers in context. Which policies are useful and which are not?

Given that rifles are involved in such a small number of murders, why go to all the effort of including rifles in the ban? Seems like a big logistical challenge and you'd make a lot of your fellow citizens unhappy.

If your proposal is to ban all semi-auto pistols (including from police) but allow all semi-auto rifles (without allowing state/local restrictions), you might get some traction. Such a plan would be better supported by numbers, better supported by the Constitution (which is talking about militia weapons), and more politically palatable (nobody will say "over my dead body" because they have to change their little gun for a big gun).

My argument was that, if you want to keep a right protected from government, bundling it into a list (like the Bill of Rights) is a good approach.

I never said that the Bill of Rights covers all possible rights or that the founders were infallible.

Your question about slavery is misguided. The founders were forming a union out of pre-existing states. It was not the founders' intent to interfere with states much at all. Only certain parts of the Constitution prohibit powers to the states, and before the 14th Amendment, the states were not as tightly bound even by the Bill of Rights (e.g. the 1st Amendment starts "Congress shall pass no law...").

The idea that you can form a union of 13 colonies and also make demands of them at the same time goes against the whole idea of the Constitution. The Constitution is a framework, and it only protects rights that were already widely regarded as rights before the union (for instance, the right to bear arms wasn't just made up for the Constitution, similar things existed in many state constitutions already).

The Constituion is amazing not because it was perfect from day one. It is amazing because it expressly limited the power of the government that it was creating (the federal government), and because it turned out to be a surprisingly resilient framework. The Bill of Rights is amazing because it got a surprising number of things right.

Going back to the original article, the 1st and 4th Amendments are still radical after 200+ years.

We can re-examine the 1st, 2nd, 4th, or whatever Amendment you want. But they seem like a good list to me, and once one is lost it is unlikely to be regained peacefully (because losing a right grants power to the government, amd governments don't like to give up power). Majority opinions do fluctuate a lot and if a simple majority could give up the rights of everyone, the entire Bill of Rights would be long gone.

Murder rates have declined dramatically since the founding and still seem to be declining or steady. So I don't want to give up the 2nd Amendment just because we have more media noise about guns, nor the 1st/4th Amendment because police have a harder time decrypting messages now. I find it weird to call rights "untenable" when everything is getting better, not worse. Like, what exactly is the big problem with freedom that it was somehow "tenable" before but now it's not?