Where a Redneck Jew, a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.
The Brady is like all happy.
Possibly the most useless injunction ever issued.
Dear judge and Brady folks: Not only the horses left the barn already, but the damn thing caught fire, burned to ashes, the place was bulldozed and a 7-11 was built on its location. Go get a Slurpee.
CodeIsFreeSpeech.com bitches!
Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.
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If memory serves, wasn’t the encryption software called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP at one point blocked under this law?
A lot of encryption systems have had their time in export controls, but as has been said more than once on this blog, ‘Can’t stop the signal, Mal’.
Yes, Phil Zimmerman was threatened with criminal prosecution under ITAR for having created PGP. In fact, he created PGP specifically because he believed — for good reasons, it appears — that the government intended to outlaw encryption ownership by peons. Among other things, he created a printed book containing the PGP source code, which was shipped overseas (to Norway?), scanned there, and converted back into computer files published on the “International PGP” website. Unfortunately, when the same approach was recently tried with Cody’s files, Amazon deleted the book. I guess it needs to be published by a more honest publisher.
After PGP, the government switched to controlling encryption software through the Commerce Department regulations, as opposed to ITAR (which is State Department). Originally those were pretty absurd, too. Over time they became incrementally less so for open source software, and by now they are reasonably ok. Still, the US Government asserts authority to control US-origin encryption software, meaning anything either written here, or written by US citizens. For that reason some open source software projects have long refused to accept encryption software contributions from the US or by US citizens. I remember that was true a decade ago for the IPSec module in Linux; I’m not sure if that is still the case.
And yes, none of this makes much sense, but if the feds decide to go after you, the jails they can send you to are still very real. So in my job I pay attention to this stuff.
I guess I’m missing something. How does a lower court judge issue an injunction on something the Supreme Court ruled was all right?
Because the “judge” is a faker who wouldn’t know a Constitutional principle if it conked him on the head?