[Cryptography] 2nd Amendment Case for the Right to Bear Crypto

[Henry Baker]

At 11:46 AM 5/12/2016, John Levine wrote:
>>So far as I know, there is *no* law prohibiting anyone in the U.S. from purchasing a bulletproof car with bulletproof
>>windows.
>
>You're probably right, but that only tells us that the government hasn't regulated them,
>not that it can't.
>
>Historically, the 2nd amendment was interpreted to refer to the state militias, i.e. the National
>Guard.  In recent years the revisionist insurrectionist theory has become popular, and it's
>been interpreted to refer to personal ownership of some set of weapons.  The exact boundaries
>of what weapons are included remain fuzzy; shotguns are pretty clearly included, machine guns
>and nuclear weapons are not.
>
>I'm not aware of any 2nd amendment cases where the "arms" weren't conventional guns, or maybe
>knives.  I understand the metaphorical appeal of applying it to crypto software, but I think
>it'd be very tough to sell it to a judge.

It takes *years*/*generations* to change people's attitudes towards laws & interpretations of the Constitution.

Even though "privacy", per se, never shows up in the Constitution, it is implicit in a number of the Amendments, and has been crystallized during the past 70 years in quite a number of decisions.  Achieving this goal required the efforts of huge numbers of people over many decades.

Ditto for gay rights, and ditto for Second Amendment rights.

All this means is that we in the encryption community have significant work to do, which will probably take the rest of our lives to gain enough traction.

Ditto for using the Third Amendment to argue against govt backdoors and implants in our devices (and soon, ourselves!).  No, it hasn't been used for this purpose in the past, but if you look to the *rationale* for the 3rd Amendment, it would certainly seem (at least to me) to apply to stationing appendages of the govt in my digital devices and networks.

As everything becomes digitalized, the importance of the First Amendment becomes stronger and stronger -- e.g., when I can download and 3D print a gun in my own home, the First Amendment starts to subsume the Second Amendment.