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Interviews: Ask Attorney and Author Mike Godwin a Question
Mike Godwin worked as the first staff counsel of the EFF and served as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been a contributing editor of Reason magazine and was elected to the Open Source Initiative board in 2011. Mike is probably best known however for coining the internet adage Godwin's Law. He is currently general counsel and director of innovation policy at the R Street Institute. Mike has given us some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question (and one comparison involving Nazis or Hitler) per post.
How would you judge the progress, Libertarianism is making in the US? Do you consider it rising, flat, or, perhaps, diminishing as a philosophy?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Do you believe governments / the US Government will succeed in forcing digital communication giants like Apple or Google to either make illegal zero-knowledge encryption methods or mandate backdoor decryptors to snoop on customer data and communications?
Well, all Godwin's Law is, in its purest form, is a look at probability. The law does not state anything about the quality or lack thereof of the analogy. What you might be thinking of is one of the many corollaries that have been derived from Godwin's Law, and incorrectly called Godwin's Law.
Is it Godwin's law to compare Hitler to Trump, aka in reverse? You know, something like "I was reading about Hitler's rise the other day.... wow, that guy was a total Donald Trump!"
Nothing says 'welcome to the neighborhood' like a gunny sack full of dead squirrels.