Who cares about Spitzer on this matter since he uses the law to bring cases against deep pockets namely financial institutions. The real authority is the Chinese government because the world belongs to them

I'd want to see the draft legislation. It may be that what Spitzer is calling for is for encryption use to be an aggravating factor. If this is the case, I can (barely) see it being acceptable, at least for the purposes of discussion.

After all, having a separate crime of aggravated battery, which a person commits if they intentionally strike somebody with a baseball bat rather than with their fist, puts no real restriction on the legitimate use of baseball bats.

However, I fear that even the esteemed NY state legislature is incapable of understanding what the legitimate uses of encryption are, whereas they probably do know what the legitimate uses of a baseball bat are.

I understand some of the harms wrought by bad digital signature legislation, but what are some of the unintended consequences of the anti-crypto efforts? I know demonstrating a counter-factual is hard, but are there credible stories/research of what the internet and the financial infrastructure might look like now if the Powers That Were had dropped the fight early on?

Chris: it would be interesting to apply some criminology econometrics work here about what possible deterrence stronger penalties would have against this sort of attack.

I'm looking for a quick comment on Spitzer's crackdown on encryption. I read your blog and thought you had smart stuff to say about it. Would you be willing to comment for a story I'm working on?

Thanks,

Alex Haislip
ahaislip at redherring dot com

Interesting stuff, thanks for bringing it to my attention:

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=11839&hed=Spitzer+Targets+Hackers