And so it begins.

What the night of 27 February, 1933 was to the freedoms of Germany, the day of 11 September, 2001 may be to the freedoms of America.

The FBI is using the terrorist attacks as an excuse to put its Carnivore systems in place. Carnivore, if you don't want to click the above link, is a system designed to sit at an ISP -- or a major network hub -- and monitor the electronic communications which pass through the site, recording them onto a removable hard drive for later perusal by the government.

But that's quite reasonable, if it'll prevent another attack like yesterday's, right?

Wrong. It permits the government to access the private communications of its ordinary citizens. But anyone with the ability to plan -- and execute -- an operation like the one which occurred yesterday certainly has the intelligence to encrypt their electronic communications. Even if the government could intercept an encrypted message and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it concerned an upcoming act of terrorism, it could take years -- or centuries -- to decrypt the message, by which time it would be too late anyway.

Exactly! That's why it makes sense to require a "back door" into all encryptation methods, so the government can decrypt them if it has reason to -- and ban all the software, like PGP, that doesn't have such a back door!

What are you, an idiot? You really think a law like that will stop a terrorist organization (or crime syndicate) from obtaining cryptographic software from a country that doesn't have such a restriction? Or stop them from hiring their own cryptographers and/or steganographers to write their own software?

You do realize that you're arguing with yourself, don't you?

It's a literary device, moron.

Are you sure you haven't developed Dissociative Identity Disorder?

Shut up.