Slashdot Mirror
Crypto Restrictions Are Taking Over the World
zeke writes: "An article on SecurityFocus details how forced key escrow and other crypto restrictions have taken root around the world, in countries like France, South Africa, the Netherlands and the UK. Ironically, this leaves the United States -- the birthplace and graveyard of the Clipper Chip -- as one of the few bastions of unregulated encryption."
LK@$#H^LKHLKNSLKJS:FDOIWJO$#IT^JO$#@K O(G*&SPD(GJLKJ$TLKJELGKJ@ KHLKSDHFLKGD
W$LTJLW$#JT
LSDJFLK$JLK$^J%@LK^JL#^
decode that message with the decoder ring you got with your SS#, and get the coorinates for osama.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Sometimes, it's really useful that the U.S. has so many different conflicting (powerful) interests, and a fairly lengthy legislative process, because it keeps things like this away (or atleast delays them a while.) Sure, the export policy was especially bad for a while, but overall, things weren't (and there will still ways around the export rules).
Besides, we all know the NSA's top top top secret quantum computer can break any encryption quickly...
That's one of the reasons for which Openbsd is developed there.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
"www.citizencorps.gov is a site that uses encryption to protect transmitted information. However, Netscape does not recognize the authority who signed its Certificate."
Because last time I checked, we STILL can't export the good stuff to them anyway. Or post the source. Or talk about it too loud.
Never confuse volume with power.
The author makes a very good point: whether we have the freedom to use crypto or not, crypto software itself hasn't come very far in the past few years.
So what can we do about it? Could Peek-a-Booty or the Six/Four protocol be used as springboards into more user-friendly crypto applications? Are there any other free/OSS projects to bring crypto to the masses? (Because God knows your average user couldn't figure out PGP or GPG if his life depended on it.)
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I haven't seen too many people argueing the other side of the coin. That is the big argument for restricting crypto is that "the terrorists" (tm) will use it to communicate with each other. Are we arguing that the "the terrorists" (tm) could be hacking into communication networks and gaining vital information from everyday conversation? It seems just as plasable. And governments that are so scared of technology might actually buy it. We could see people in power start to advocate the encryption of all communications!
Probably just wishful thinking but I'd love to see it tried.
The Anti-Blog
This about sums it up for the UK.
We`re all doomed!!! doomed i tells ya!!
It may not be free beer (no EU-style social safety net), but you have all the opportunity that you can make for yourself.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
There is a considerable difference between a gun and a lock on the door to your house.
Just as there is a considerable difference between nuclear weapons and "munitions-grade encryption".
Encryption doesn't have the power to kill anyone, it just has the power to protect privacy and hide information. While a nuclear weapon has the power to destroy.
If they ban encryption, why not ban locks, doors, window shades, make walls out of glass, and allow video cameras and audio tapes to be placed in every nook and cranny of your house. You have nothing to hide, that's why high-grade encryption is useless right?
Think about it.
God, I love the fact I am a Canadian at times like these.
~ kjrose
The main way that most people use encryption is when they order something from a web site, and the traffic is encrypted to protect credit-card numbers. I've been wondering how well the various restrictive governments police this.
Consider that most users aren't even really aware that they are encrypting their internet traffic. It's done by behind-the-scene transactions between their browser and the remote web site. The user never invokes any encryption software, and never sees the keys.
Will we eventually see cases where a poor baffled user is arrested and charged with illegal encryption, when what they really did was order a pair of socks from llbean.com?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
....when you are being detained as part of the "war on terror" without trial and denied legal counsel.
But yeah there are bad encryption laws in other places like here in the UK. Its worrying.
no sig.
When you outlaw encryption, only the outlaws will have encryption...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
In the past few years, US cryptographic laws have relaxed considerably. In the old days, there was separate versions of IE and Netscape, one with 128 bit encryption for US citizens, and a weaker (i think 56 bit) version for everyone else. Now anyone can get the high strength version (in fact they dont bother making the low strength ones anymore).
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I know the general Slashdot response is going to be how we are being oppressed, and that's my first reaction also. There is another side however. What these supposedly democratic countries are facing is the ugly truth about all such governments: they play by a set of rules while the other side is completely unfettered. With Western Europe's recent history of terrorist groups such as Action Direct and the Red Brigade, I think it's clear that they have serious obstacles to face when dealing with the current technologically adept terrorists. The fact is, since they are hindered by the "rights" that they do let us keep, we have to expect them to try something to protect us. We can be outraged, but do we have another method they can use? Creating a repository of keys is to me a desperate act, not just a simple power grab. The real question is how far behind the curve are these intelligence types when dealing with Internet enabled terrorists? All I'm saying is that I think this sucks, but it isn't necessarily a power grab to create a society based on "1984".
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
While I agree with you in principal, in an age where information itself can be a powerful weapon,
encryption is a problematic issue. There are those (of which I am not one) who would argue that
information ought to be subject to the same type of controls as narcotics or radioactive materials,
both of which have valuable and legally sanctioned uses.
Don't read this!
Well, those countries don't have a history of providing their citizens with the almost absurd levels that the US does. In Britain, you don't have nearly the same rights that you do in the US, and while the Netherlands is a socially permissive country in many respects, it's also very tough on law and order for those things that it deems are social problems (just because in Amsterdam you can buy pot and sex doesn't mean you can kill someone in Utrecht). And South Africa has hardly had any history whatsoever of having solid personal freedoms. So while you can look at the problem pragmatically ("the US looked at the issues and realized that they're unworkable"), you can't just look at it from a US-civil-liberties perspective ("no one should be willing to give a government that much power").
The problem, as the author correctly identifies, is that anything along the lines of key recovery is completely unworkable in practice at all. While it might look nice sitting in a piece of legislation, it's impossible to enforce. Cryptography isn't something like a gun, that's physically manufactured, it's a bunch of mathematical equations (remember the whole RSA on a T-Shirt campaign?). You can't stop the providers of something based on mathematics, and you can't force everybody in teh world to start keeping track of other people's keys, or else they'll just start using "illegal" encryption.
And that's the real kicker: regardless of whether you want your citizens to have the power to encrypt things such that you can't have acccess to them, you can't stop them in any way. All you do by attempting is instantly incriminating a pretty significant portion of your population to access information that you can still get elsewhere (like keystroke loggers that the FBI uses to get passwords, or search warrants for hardware encryption devices, which are both pretty effective IMHO for key recovery purposes). You can't outlaw mathematics (the whole US issue highlighted that), so you really shouldn't try.
You know, I'm kind of glad encryption hasn't made many inroads for regular communications of casual users. I find it really hard to be on the pro-crypto side of almost anything. (And then there's that USA Today Report on using Ebay for posted embedding messages in images...)
Then again, I've always had an underdeveloped sense of privacy. It's really never been a big concern of mine, security through obscurity (or maybe apathy...if someone wants to know enough to bother to ask I'll probably tell them)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Well that all depends on your point of view.
The UK has far more employment rights than the US has.
also the right to medical treatment.
the right to life (no death penality).
The right to get arrested without being put in handcufs.
Hell I can even crack a joke with the police if they get stopped, and give them a bit of hastle e.g. Have you got any ID? so long as i don't break any serious law or take the piss to much.
I can buy tin foil, baking soda, spoons, bongs etc.... without feer of being arrested.
I can have a open bottle in the car.
I can cross the road.
When I was younger I had even more rights, maybe the UK is just trying to catch up with the poor human rights policy in the US.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Why should I need crypto when I have palladium to ensure the security of my PC anyway?
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
Cetainly the NSA are secret but we can have reasonably guesses as to what technology they use.
I think it is silly to suppose that they have quantum computers or some other exotic super computer.
And with current technology decrypting because completely impractical as long as your key is long enough.
I encrypt things so that nobody can have access to my ideas without my permission. It is basically the equivalent of having a disk drive put into my brain. The government cannot pry things out of my head, what makes them think that they should have the right to know what I MEAN when I put something down on paper? They have no right to know. The best they can do is convince me to cooperate.
"You childish twit. Canada is nothing of the sort....."
Irony goes right over your head dosen't it?
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
... supports strong encryption for it's fellow citizens and the industry and I count Germany to the developped countries...
I think the rules may have been revised, but it used to be the case (and still may be) that crypto over 40 bits was regulated under ITAR (Internation Traffic in Arms Regulations), and was classified as a munition.
Technically, any attempt to restrict US domestic crypt may have been a violation of the Second Amendment, as well as the obvious First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment violations.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Am I the only one who really read this, or did I not read it right.
I saw places where it said "..and the police can order you to hand over your keys" or '..such and such a company has to register with the officials', but nowhere did it say '...you can't use encryption'. (I do agree that the key escrow stuff is very bad though.)
Just like a gun, ecnryption can be used for good things (hiding my p0rn from my girlfriend), or bad (emailing terrorism plots to agents.) In this country (USA), if the police have enough evidence, they can go to a judge and get a very specific search warrant. So, if they accuse me of having illegal p0rn (instead of just the good stuff), they can search my computer till the cows come home. But if they find a terrorism plot, they can't use that information.
To follow that point, what is wrong with issuing a search warrant and demanding that I decrypt the data?? I may not like it, especially if I'm guilty or don't want to share my p0rn, but I don't see where that is any different than letting the police go through a drug dealers house looking for drugs. Ok...there is that fifth amendment thing, so maybe a law like that couldn't even be enacted in the US.
And so what if company X has to register with the government. They probably had to get a business permit anyway, and if they do anything novel they probably have patents. Not too many companies survive by being secret about their existance.
So...tell me what is all the hub, bub.....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Yes, the US has a vast number of people imprisoned for what are, IMHO, completely racist, culturally insensitive, and immoral laws. Yes, that rate is extremely high.
Do I think that stuff like citizencorps is a particularly good idea? Nope. Do I think it infringes on my civil liberties? Well, actually, no, unless the fact that Bob down the hall turns me in for buying a hardware cryptography device gives the police special powers. The fact that it might is what makes me nervous.
But I think that my point is that when it comes to limiting governmental interference in my privacy (not private life, by the way, considering the number of states where Sodomy is still a crime), and guaranteeing those limitations, we're doing pretty well.
But of course you've found some functional society with more rights and Freedom, so I'd be interested in hearing about that paradise.
We all talk about how Osama bin Laden uses 128-bit encyrption, but in actuality, the laptops captured in Afganistan were using the default Windows encryption - lousy 40-bit encryption. Another terrorist used the default encryption on his palmtop, which was quickly enough cracked by the French government. It seem that most terrorists don't know enough to use serious encryption. Now, nothing is going to take serious encyrption out of the hands of geeks, but the default encryption is what matters for most people, and that's what needs to be cracked most the time. Silently turning on strong encryption does not help law and order.
- Voter turnout in Britain keeps sinking;
- The UK also has a First Past the Post system for individual constituencies;
- There isn't universal enfranchisement for choosing party leaders (witness the farce that resulted in IDS' selection as Conservative Party leader)
You end up with a situation where it's entirely possible for a prime minister to be chosen by what is actually a quite small number of people, because each point above increases the chance that a non-majority will choose the Prime Minister.If you mean to say that the selection of the Prime Minister in the last UK General Election happened as a result of the outcome of the last UK General Election with no judicial intervention (which would have made little sense anyway since there is no independant judiciary in the UK), then I suppose I'll agree with you. :-)
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you! I mean, if I went around saying I was an Emperor because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, people would put me away!
(Sorry, somehow the "not installed by a judiciary" triggered this in my brain)
Does anyone see a quandary with Palladium, encryption and government in general?
If Palladium is implemented, as everyone expects it will, and encryption becomes standard to the operating system does this not mean that the data on the hard drive is therefore protected from intrusion by outside sources? Would this not be a boon for those looking protect their nefarious purposes from prying eyes? This creates a problem for Microsoft and computer manufacturers in general; How to provide "trustworthy computing" to the general public while resassuring the government that data can be retrieved from hard drives when needed.
If Microsoft or the Palladium hardware manufacturers build in a "backdoor" for just this purpose, then the idea of trustworthy computing is lost. Who would trust their sensitive data to a compromised system? Hence the quandary.
Since there are "no crypto restrictions in the US" my MCS professor can teach cryptography again? Last i checked such was not the case.
Even if you make transmitting encrypted communication illegal, it's not going to stop criminals. Hiding cyphertext is just too easy. For example, take a 16-bit wave file and use the least significant bit of each sample for your cyphertext. Assuming your cyphertext doesn't have any header data, it will be virtually undetectable. The only thing someone might notice is some very low level white noise in the background that could be attributed to anything.
Similar things can be done with jpegs, mpegs, and a host of other file formats. If government officials had a better understanding of the technology, they wouldn't waste our time with laws that only hurt law abiding citizens and do nothing to curtail crime.
If you live near Albuquerque NM USA, please visit my journal.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The ECommerce Act
in Ireland approaches it as follows: Not perfect, but I have seen worse. There are also expressions that people are entitled to use the strongest available forms of encryption, and should be encouraged to do so
If you check American Colonial history really carefully, you'll find that the Pilgrims didn't come to the New World(C) for religious tolerance; they had that in the Netherlands. What they came for was to set up their OWN religious tyranny (example: the excommunication of some religious nonconformists from the Mass Bay colonies). Religious freeedom was only on the Puritan mind insofar as it meant freedom to practice THEIR religious orthodoxy as THEY dictated it.
Fortunately, things have loosened up a bit since, but the ideological descendents of the Puritans (insert name of your favorite religious fundamentalist here) are ever with us...
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I hope this doesn't descend into a US freedoms versus someone elses freedoms because there is no universal set of freedoms humans need (other than things like food, shelter, air, etc).
Most everyone understands that there are limitations to freedom. Hell, even a perfect omniscient judiciary couldn't make a totally free society exist (e.g. how to choose between two parties' gripes when both are contradictory? Someone is going to have to lose).
So governments chose which freedoms are best limited and those that need to be preserved. In the end I think it is all arbitrary. You just have to have some system that allows for a decision to be made. Firearms are legal or they aren't. Nazi Memorabilia is legal or it isn't. The same with encryption.
Basically you can limit anything people can do without forever. But that goes against what freedom stands for. In the end countries have to make choices. And I doubt that any one (say France's versus the US versus Japan) are better than any other.
In the end I think it comes down to economic interest. What jobs/corporations/industries does a company need to have strategic overlay in order to survive. Saudi Arabia is concerned about its oil interest and the people who own and work for it, not the nature of the shoe industry in Malasyia. From that point outward the society's policy is formed.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Unfortunately, this just means that a quantum computer quickly determines if you won or lost. It doesn't help you play any better nor worse, merely to calculate your ranking faster.
Of course, you have to use the mod which lets you carry around sealed boxes which you open whenever you meet an opponent. You can play faster with Smell-O-Vision, as you can tell faster if a cat is dead or not.
I believe the parent poster was trying to point out that the US emphasizes prosecution of what are considered social 'crimes', like marijuana possession, prostitution, etc; as well as politically fruitful crimes like computer hacking (life sentence, baby!) and hate crimes; and that these are often frequently prioritized over violent crimes. Whereas the Netherlands allows the social 'crimes' and cracks down on the violent crimes with vigor. In the US, this is largely a result of federal mandatory sentencing on politically hot issues, which is basically Congressmen playing judge for the votes, but for whatever reason, the results are striking: drug possession offenders serve time in prison roughly equal to murderers, longer than rapists, and substantially longer than robbery inmates. Our policies have had some interesting effects: amongst Western democracies, we have the highest violent crime rate, the largest percentage of population living in poverty, and the largest percent of population in prison (actually, we have the overall world record on this one). I cannot speak for the Netherlands sentencing length numbers, but I do know that they have 1/10 the rate of violent crime per population as is present in the US; and their prison population is equally low. Given the lack of distracting things their prosecutors have to deal with, I think we can draw a causal connection.
This article is just plain wrong. True, a few years ago, France was one of the few country in the world where encryption was illegal, along with Iran, Irak and North Corea. I think that even today you're legally limited to 128-bit encryption, but nobody gives a shit. I think that most legislators never heard about such a thing as encryption, let alone key escrow. Basically no legislator gives a shit about computer security because there are other more important problems, like getting reelected through FUD. France's policy on computer security is simply one long string of oddities, mainly composed of long forgotten fags nobody cares about anymore. It's quite nice actually! No DMCA, multizones DVD players everywhere...
Nobox: Only simple products.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Well. Digital Crypto , is for the most part 90% a waste of time for particularly sensitive data.
Its like the old MasterLock commercials, "Sure you can shoot it with a 308 in the middle and itll hold" but take a $5 pair of bolt cutters to it and its dust. Crypto is the same way, the client computers are the weak link, and as goverments spend more time and effort on Electronic Cypto, assuming it is the preffered route.
Well quite frankly it makes it EASIER to disseminate information in the plain REAL world, How hard is it to get a warrant to sniff email, In the US you dont even NEED one !!!!.
BUT let the FEDS TRY to get a warrant to open your snail mail, its damm near impossible.
Paper and Pen , these are going to be the Crypto tools of the next century.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
This is yet another point demonstrating the superiority of OSS & FS.
Closed-sourced-software (CSS) can easily be regulated, because it often has immobile targets of regulation. Companies can't afford to dick around with defying government regulation.
However, try to regulate OSS / FS. Its not possible. Few things go into OSS / FS that users don't want, and if things go in there that users really don't want, they will eventually be purged (either by a fork, or by users individually who simply delete the offending lines of source code).
Part of the reason OSS / FS is not regulable is because you can't control what users do with it once they get it. A user gets OSS / FS software, and it can include all the DRM and spyware in the world -- doesn't matter if the user doesn't want it; the user can simply delete the offending lines of code, do a little bit of work, and recompile, or (s)he can hire someone else do to do that. It only takes one person to do this and then offer the modifications to the public -- possibly anonymously -- for the offending code to be removed from nearly every install. [it should be noted that this has even occured for CSS (refer to Kazaa, which includes virus', spyware, and adware, all of which were removed in KazaaLite)].
The other reason why OSS / FS can't be regulated is because of its very nature. How do you regulate something for which no one makes any profits, no one need reveal their identity to contribute to, and which is free as in freedom (and usually free as in beer)? You can't. Not effectively anyways. Sure, the government can drag its heels, but there is no effective way to regulate OSS / FS -- not even for an authoritarian state like China. Every move that is made attempting to regulate OSS / FS can easily be countered and alluded by OSS / FS devlopers.
Demand that no one release crytpo software w/o a gov't backdoor, the penalty being multi-million dollar fines and long jail time? Works great on all CSS and businesses. They'll be scared shitless; their execs and programmers too. Doesn't work at all on OSS / FS developers. They simply start developing and posting anonymously, possibly post from a server in another country, possibly move to another country, or publish the code from a public terminal.
This is not to say the government can't be an inconvenience. Taking special steps to post anonymously or posting from a public terminal is a nuisance, as would be (obviously) hosting software on a server outside one's own nation or moving to another nation. Obviously, we should work to make OSS / FS as unregulatable as possible. The CBGTA should not be allowed to in any way touch OSS / FS.
Obviously, one major key to making sure government regulations don't hinder OSS / FS is anonymosity. The government cannot regulate what it can't see. Regulation relies on having a target to be regulated -- i.e., the poster of the code. If one can't see that target, one can't effectively regulate. Another key is distribution. Even if the government can't regulate the developers themselves, it can target the servers they use to post their code to the world, taking it down. The way to deal with this is obviously mirrors, as well as working on distribution through P2P.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
If the cops get a search warrant for, say, pot plants in your house, they'll be able to tell pretty easily whether you're growing or not. Step 1: find all the plants; step 2: see if they're pot plants.
... 3 years, 4 appeals, and 1 bankruptcy later.
But say they want to look for incriminating digital evidence that you're growing or dealing pot. You can't just decrypt the stuff you want them to see and say, "This is not the encrypted data you're looking for. I can go on my way."
No, they're going to decrypt everything. This means that while they might not find evidence of pot, they might find something else. And sure, it may not stand up in a court of law
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But then again, what about the open source projects? Who's providing the crypto? Where are they? Does downloading a program hosted on a server in the US from a computer in South Africa make the server provider a company which had to register? What happens if they haven't? What if I'm just distributing source code? You see, even if you say "okay, well, we'll just screw over RSA but we'll all be fine in our Stallman Warm Fuzzy Blankets," you're ignoring the issues involved in registration laws.
Yeah, the laws have softened in the U.S. yet no Linux distribution (other than ones originating from outside the country) will ship with an IPsec implementation pre-installed.
There is still alot of fear that this softening of restictions will eventually rebound.
SUPPORTING INFORMATION
----------------------
Here is a list of some distributions that do include IPsec and their country of origin:
SuSE Linux (Germany)
Conectiva (Brazil)
Mandrake (France)
Best Linux (Finland)
Polish(ed) Linux Distribution (Poland)
come on fhqwhgads
No man has the right to another man's properity. If there is a dispute between me and the bank regarding funds then that dispute should be settled by objective laws that are only concerned with establishing ownership of the disputed funds, not my "need" or the banks "need".
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
The current UK legal position is set out in the European Union's Pregnancy Directive, which came into force in 1995, and the UK Employment Rights Act (1996).
All workers, irrespective of length of service, are protected from being dismissed on the grounds of pregnancy or maternity; and are entitled by statute to at least 14 weeks of maternity leave (longer, in most cases).
However, there were substantial protections in place even before these Acts.
What exactly is this mystical support for the unemployed? That they are garaunteed to *be* unemployed?
Unemployment % Rate: UK 5.2%, USA 5.9% (The Economist, 13.7.2002)
The issues that OpenBSD works around by being based in Canada are solely related to the restrictions (since relaxed) the USA had on the export of encryption. The PGP issue was related to US patents on certain algorithms.
In the USA, us Americans are unrestricted in our use of crypto, except that we run afoul of munitions export laws if we share our crypto routines with foreigners, including foreign nationals in the US.So yes, we are 'a bastion of unregulated encryption', but like any nation, we don't like our citizens providing weapons to enemies of the state. No contradiction there.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
"Ironically, this leaves the United States -- the birthplace and graveyard of the Clipper Chip -- as one of the few bastions of unregulated encryption."
Think about it: Wouldn't DOD/whatever traffic be easier to intercept and decrypt if it were the only encrypted traffic in the US? The more Joe Shmoe uses encryption, the tougher it is for enemies to pin down flows that have any stratiegic value.
Because there are only six countries in the world after all.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Nowadays you can be arrested without court order,
your house can get searched without court order,
your phones can get tapped (you guess... without court order), you call that free?
Three points:
Otherwise, you make some good points.
in an age where information itself can be a powerful weapon
More importantly, information is the ONLY true source of freedom in a democratic society.
Restrict information like this, and you grab free society by the neck and strangle it to death.
Just having elections isn't enough. you need to have separation of powers. The United States does that extremely well, (although I'm sure they could improve).
On paper this appears to be the case. But the complete domination of US politics by two political parties makes rather a nonsense of this...
Here it is, in a nutshell for you: In the UK, you buy something. If there's something wrong with it, you can return it. The seller is not obliged to give you a refund, if he/she can provide a replacement.
If the item is faulty the seller has no choice at all what is happened. It's the customer who can choose either a refund, repair or replacement. A repair or replacement does not however void the seller's obligation to supply goods and services of satisfactory quality.
All workers, irrespective of length of service, are protected from being dismissed on the grounds of pregnancy or maternity; and are entitled by statute to at least 14 weeks of maternity leave (longer, in most cases).
Unfortunatly the employer isn't protected from having to pay two people to do one job and possibly having to fill a post at short notice. So they might be reluctant to employ women in the first place. Thus it's possible that women workers end up disadvantaged by laws intended to protect them...
Forcing me to feed my kids isn't a "right" is a violation of my "right" to let the kids die..
In general a right is something that prevents discrimination or persecution of a group, a right is given to someone.
on the other side there's obligations,
An obligation might be something like you are obliged to feed you kids.
You have the right to be treated fairly by an employer, this is done by giving that employer some obligations.
Your kids have the right to be feed by you, this is done by giving you some obligations.
If someone fails in there obligations and deprives you of your rights then there rights are removed from them... E.g. the right to have/look after children, the right to own or run a company and employ people.
In the UK when someone fails in there obligations your rights are still upheld, the kid still gets fed, you get support until you find a job etc....
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The UN list includes basic freedoms of life, liberty, freedom of movement, legal recourse and equality before the law. They also include a number of freedoms that justify cryptography and the right to not be forced to reveal your keys:
This doesn't specifically include crypto, but it can be argued that privacy and freedom of thought and conscience include freedom to not be compelled to expose private data. There's a huge difference between the concept of'unlimited freedom, without restriction' and the concept of 'governments can do whatever they like to their subjects'.More pragmatically, allowing people near-unlimited personal freedom to try and fail clearly is a successful model. If my actions do no material harm to others, why restrict my freedom?
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
There not Christian.... Have you not read the bible?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You've just changed your stance.
Well done, read through all the comments you have made and make sure there consistant.
you've argued everything from god given rights and natural law (three wolves and a sheep!) to morality
What you've just said is that thease things don't tie up in the way you think they do, but you havn't realised that yet.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You've just created a paradox, this is why we have 'rights'
I cannot force you to obey my will
and you cannot forge me to obey your will.
But what happens where there's a conflict.
I want to build a house on this bit of land,
you also want to build a house on the same bit of land (after all i want it so it must be good!)
Extend the argument to lots of things and there are huge networks of conflicting interests, someone has to decide who's going to win and who's going to loose (there by forcing there will upon you!).
I cannot live through subsistance because it conflicts with others who want land. So I don't have the right to be subsistant (i.e. I need a Job) and inturn land owners &co have a responsibility to employ me.
This is the sheep and wolf problem.
The sheep want to eat grass, and the wolfs want to eat sheep, the comprimise is for the wolfs to manage the sheep population which inturn manages there population. (we do this through farming)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Who Owns the land?
No-one it's the begining of time. infact who decides who owns the land, who has that right?
The whole basis of the philisophical argument is taken from the begining of time and then extrapolated, this produces a logical argument with no moral conflicts. Starting the argument as the current time implies all current moralities on that argument.
"You have a responsibility to learn a useful skill"
Well who is going to teach me, goto begining of paradox loop.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Ok lets pick out the rights you mentioned in the past couple of comments that impose someone elses morals on another.
"claims the land" , again who decides that you've claimes it....
"US National Forest" has more rights than normal land, this has imposed the moral of not destroying the forest on say logging companies
You mentioned that is my responsiblity to learn so I can't just go to a place of work and start working there, it is my responsibility to learn, read previous desussion on responsibilities and rights, this point was made very early on.
the skills, you failed to extrapolate the argument and take into account why skills are required.
Remeber I don't want you to believe the things I believe, I just want to make sure you realy know what YOU believe and try to express an argument using terminology that you understand and pointing out where I don't understand your terminology. If your arguments contain paradoxes and conflictions then you mind isn't clear in your beliefs
And what the hell do you have agains Gay Wales that makes you want to nuke them?
BTW, I got kicked out of collage and am more or less wholly self taught. My main work is breaking down systems into components and performing abstract dataflow analysis, I have been doing this for 15years and am respected by both my peers and colleagues, conflict resolution and Systems analysis is what I do and what people praise me for doing.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
True, which is why they should not have all the power. Would you also like to address my comment about police being able to do their jobs effectively?