LCA: How to destroy your community

Posted Jan 21, 2010 21:50 UTC (Thu) by mrdoghead (guest, #61360)
In reply to: LCA: How to destroy your community by zooko
Parent article: LCA: How to destroy your community

This is appalling. And as usual anything the NSA asks the computer corporate structure in the US - and elsewhere, worse - it gets with little argument. And what the intel-LE types somehow don't get all too willingly they find ways to get otherwise. This stuff needs to stop.

LCA: How to destroy your community

Posted Jan 24, 2010 7:21 UTC (Sun) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

I don't know how to fight against this sort of shenanigans. Giant corporations, even though they are powerful in some ways, are ironically very susceptible to semi-legal pressure from shadowy governmnet agencies. If they had resisted NSA's pressure, there could have easily arisen some unfortunately legal snag that could have, for example, prevented them from exporting their wares until it got cleared up, thus costing them millions of dollars per day until the government gave them the go-ahead.

I politely asked the Sun employees that I was talking to if they would give me the crypto engine source under GPL, given that I was a U.S. citizen living in U.S. borders and thus it was clearly legal for them to share it with me. They didn't write back to that request. ;-)

(I had a vague notion that I might try exporting it myself and become and Internet martyr like Phil Zimmermann did in 1991. It's probably for the best that I never had the chance, as my family depends on me to bring home regular paychecks rather than to engage in dangerous civil disobedience.)