My physics intuition (which unsurprisingly probably doesn't work well on things the size of galaxies) tells me that even if I magically started with a straight-line structure, it would immediately start to become curved, as the closer-to-the-center stars orbit faster than the further out ones. No? How can these straight structures exist? And yeah, now that I think of it, that goes for "bar" galaxies too. WTF?
Unless he got them to sign some sort of contract before showing them the plans
My guess is that's what happened (or Hogan believes it happened or virtually happened with a handshake or whatever). There's just no reasonable way this case could be over IP law. It's just gotta be over some kind of don't-use-my-idea or non-complete agreement, and the dispute will be over what was really agreed to by who.
"Sir, about that planet, we've detected a flash of light." "Captain, are you telling me they're testing nucular bombs?" "No sir, just a flash of l--" "Do you have any idea what the public will do when they discover the aliens are testing WMDs and we have no plan for dealing with them?" "Sir, I was mistaken. There was no flash of light." "Not good enough, captain." "Sir, I was mistaken. There was no planet." "That's more like it."
Surprise surprise, people are confused about truth verses illusion. If I made my money on religion, though, I wouldn't be talking about this in public. If you encourage people to ask questions like "How do I know if what I see in this picture is real?" they might ask the same question about other things too. Sshhhh.
separating them into Mac and PC labels makes it easy for conversation regarding the two.
No, that's just it. It doesn't make for easy conversation; it makes for confusing and ambiguous conversation, like talking about Toyotas vs cars would, if someone arbitrarily and unilaterally defined car as meaning only automobiles that were built in England. PC used to mean personal computer, and then it meant IBM-PC-compatible computer, generally drifted to meaning generic x86 computer (which is almost the same thing, but has become less stringent, and then it meant Windows, while the x86 definition got refined to include all x86 machines except for the ones built by a single manufacturer (Apple). It's gone through too many meanings (and forks!), so when someone says it, you don't know which one they mean unless you're already intimately familiar with the context.
When talking about computers in general (such that mainframes might not be off-topic), PC usually means personal computer; when talking about games, it usually means Windows; when talking about Macs, sometimes it means generic x86 and sometimes it means Windows. But when you come at the conversation from a different direction or from a gray area (e.g. you're comparing Linux gaming with console gaming) then it's totally ambiguous and you have to assume it means both until someone says something that (to you) obviously only refers to one of them, and then you say, "ah, you were talking about Windows and didn't mean to ask or imply anything about OpenBSD" and then someone else says "no, we're still ambiguous at this point," and then you have a flamewar and whatever the original subject was, is forgotten by then.
The best thing to do is either only use it by its original meaning, or kill the word. And since abused words can't ever be reclaimed (e.g. "hacker", "bricked", etc) they must be humanely slaughtered.
And on the other hand you have a Facebook founder telling them its ok
I followed the link but couldn't find the part where the Facebook founder said (or implied) its ok. (Not saying you're wrong; I just didn't find it.) Got a quote?
The idea that ok things should be required and not-ok things should be illegal, is pretty crazy. Tolerance and advocacy are totally different things. I hate rap and county music but I've never asked for a law against them, and if someone tries to pass such a law, I'll be on the same side as the rednecks and homeboys, just as I expect them to be there for me if the PMRC comes after metal again.;-) The question isn't under which circumstances marijuana is good or bad for someone, the question is whether or not it's a good idea to use force against someone who uses it in a way that you wouldn't.
The real mixed message is this: On one hand, you have the government saying that it's not ok to use violence against other people without provocation (laws against kidnapping), and on the other hand, you have the government saying it's ok to use violence against other people without provocation (no laws against arresting drug users). This country has lost sight of what the government is for, so we've got it doing all kinds of psycho self-contradicting things. Ending prohibition is a step toward making it less psycho and making the message more consistent. And that consistent message will be: the purpose of government is to protect its citizens' liberty.
The primary way it'll improve national security is by lowering the imports, since domestic production will be more competitive when it is less threatened by the government. (And then on top of that, you can layoff or re-purpose some LEOs so they can do more productive things.) A wealthier country is a more secure one. It's own citizens become less of a threat to it, and it can afford to spend more on defense too. It's just win win win across the board.
The secondary way it works, is that it takes wealth away from gangsters (prohibition isn't exactly a subsidy for criminals, but it's a lot like one). Fewer powerful criminals in Mexico means a much more secure Mexico, less violence in the border area, etc. Plenty of security benefits will rub off on the US.
There's another way it improves national security too, but you have to look at things a certain way that I'm not sure everyone shares, so it's not as objective as the above ways. A nation is its people, so things which threaten those people (such as the nation's government putting them in jail for no good reason) is a national security threat. i.e. If we end prohibition, then the "attacks" (where citizens are suddenly deprived of their liberty) end. Think of the resources we're spending to launch and sustain the attacks (paying cops and prison guards) and defending ourselves from the attacks (paying public defenders). We could be spending that on defending the nation instead of having the nation attack itself.
There might be reasons for prohibition, but it comes at a cost and security is part of that.
Intent is exactly what I was getting at. (What part of "with the knowledge and consent of the owner" made you think I was blowing off intent?!) They intended for the car owner to have possession of the bug. You can argue they intended the car owner to have temporary or conditional possession of the bug, but if they don't communicate that, then what's a reasonable thing for the finder to assume? My point is that it sure as hell wasn't lost, misplaced, planted by mistake, etc. If you look at it on the lost-to-gift spectrum, it's a lot closer to a gift.
If you find a phone in a bar, it's reasonable for the finder to assume it's probably lost -- it's there by mistake -- and we expect the finder to try to return it to its owner. This is not only a law, but it's also just plain courteous and fits in with the ethic of "don't be an asshole; give back the phone because you would want someone to give back your phone."
If you find something that is deliberately planted, it's not lost. Bringing up the if-unclaimed-after-30-days rule is just total bullshit. Someone didn't just make a mistake or misplace it; they deliberately gave up control of the item and (informed and consenting) accepted a significant risk that they wouldn't get it back.
On top of that, they performed an act that is unambiguously hostile (like someone knowingly giving you HIV); courtesy is the wrong attitude to take and the best ethics are to harm the enemy however you can. And if there happens to be law that says you have to give it back, it sure as hell ain't the same law that says you have to give a lost phone back, and it's a law that will be far outside most laymens' day-to-day experiences.
It's just an utterly, completely different thing -- in character, in intent, in every way -- than the lost phone example, and the phone comparison is without merit.
If I leave a CD in your car, and say, "You keep this," then it is a gift.
If at the moment you're getting our of my car, you get a pensive look, then pull a CD out of your pocket, put it into my player, nod when it starts playing, and leave without a word (no "you keep this") is that a gift? Maybe that's not your intent, but if we end up fighting over that CD later, I bet most people will side with me.
The government still has a very real interest in not losing that property - enough so that it has a fucking GPS hooked up to a transmitter, so that you always know where the device is.
Heh heh, you almost got me there. You're right. Ah, but it's an "interest." I can't help but wonder if most givers have "an interest" in not giving, but then do it anyway. If they really wanted to know where the device is, they wouldn't surrender control of it. They chose to sacrifice that interest for some other gain, like any other giver. I would even go as far as to say that the intent of the putting the GPS in the device, is something other than to track their inventory so that it doesn't get lost in the wrong part of their warehouse. It's not for "shrinkage" control.
...what happens when the computer or display goes haywire or sends you in to an uncharted area?
That will never happen, because it doesn't have the capacity to "send" you anywhere. It can only display advisory informat--wait, this is going to be wired into the car's control system? NOOOOOO!!
Wire it up to someone else's battery, and now you're committing theft of services. It's one thing to bug someone's car, but to have them pay to operate it? I doubt any of the statues or rulings that say warrants aren't necessary, have legalized that.
That phone was lost. The owner did not intend to transfer ownership.
This device was placed with the knowledge and consent of the owner at that time. Do you have to make an attempt to return a gift?
If I place something in your car, not accidentally leaving it behind or mistakenly leaving the wrong item, why wouldn't you be the owner? Sure, it might not be worth fighting about if I really badly want it back and you're not rich/motivated enough to fight, but assuming you went through with it to the point of getting a jury, then it's probably going to remain yours.
They took out some parts related to fighting piracy (e.g. disconnecting pirates) but left the parts that are the least related to piracy and has the greatest impact on non-pirate-related uses:
when it comes to tools for doing the circumventing, these are broadly banned, even where some limited uses might be legal. This appears to set up a situation in which an ACTA signatory could allow people to bypass DRM to make backups or exercise fair use rights, but could not allow distribution of the tools to help them do it.
So still: you can't make or sell a Bluray player, a cable box, etc. You'll be allowed to use these devices (except in US) but there won't be any legal way to get to the point of having one. Lame.
If your country adopts ACTA as it is, your country is still going to adopt the very worst part of DMCA.
..tach CEOs are disinterested third parties with no ulterior motive. They're not after some ludicrously expensive contract for several years, combined with building a new terrible legacy and network effects which basically cause a lock-in for long after the original contract. Finally someone you can trust!
[squints at monitor]
Hey waitaminute. These are the guys who run companies that only make tachometers, right?
the 5th Amendment privilege against self-incrimination does not require the conclusion that a criminal defendant may elect not to divulge a password for an encrypted hard drive
That's why my passphrase is "I committed the crime."
Oops, now I need to change the passphrase on my luggage. Maybe I'll change it to "is my little secret" and when the keystone kops come after me, I'll quip a cryptic comment about Quine.
How exactly do they know its a 50 character password?
Interesting that 50*log(36)/log(2)=258. My guess is that he has software which obviously uses a 256 bit key, and someone had to explain what "256 bits" means to some layman, and they said, "It's about the same amount of information as 50 letters-or-numbers."
Munroe, who often gets so much stuff right, got the Crypto Nerd's Imagination all wrong. There are three other (much more plausible) panels he could have drawn.
1) One panel would say, "The laptop is encrypted. I wish I knew where to find the guy I stole it from, so that I could ask him the password or beat it out of him with my $5 wrench. Surely he'll come back to the coffee shop if I sit here and wait long en-- Oh goody, he's here. SHIT, he has a $10 wrench!!"
2) One panel would say, "Half the country's packets are encrypted. We're not going to know what everyone is doing on the internet, until we hire a fifty thousand people and buy them each a wrench and give them a house-to-house route. [Later:] SHIT, the budget didn't get approved, because the press made a big stink after we threatened the 207th person."
3) One panel would say, "Muahahah, we got his laptop. Quick, let's get the info off it really fast and then slip it back into his office before he gets back from lunch. He'll never know!! Shit, it's encrypted. Go get the wrench. No, wait. SHIT. If we threaten him with the wrench into revealing the key, he'll know what we did."
Everybody knows that once people with greater force and the willingness to use it come after you, you're fucked. You're either going to give up your secrets, suffer their wrath, or (unlikely but possible) get a bigger bully to fight them off. That's not the problem that crypto solves. The other scenarios I just mentioned, though, it does solve, and it solves very well. If you're a crypto nerd and these aren't in your imagination, then you don't have much of an imagination.
As for Oliver Drage, a sneak-and-peek warrant would have failed. He knows they're investigating him, can talk to a lawyer, and defend himself as much as a government allows someone to do that. Without crypto, what might have happened?
Skype sucks because it is closed, and no one knows how it handles the key exchange. If Skype were serious about security, they could still be proprietary but would at least be open about exactly how the encryption works, and they would also almost certainly have a way for users to be their own trusted introducers so that people could use it with confidence that there is no MitM.
But they don't, so they are very likely a trap. People have been bitching about this for many years, so if they weren't broken, they would have defended themselves by now.
But I fail to see any substantial way in which Obama's policies are different.
To be the same as Bush, Obama needs to start a new war, as unnecessary and expensive as Iraq. (Actually, he also needs to get Congress (including the opposing party) to agree that it's a good idea and fund it! That's how amazing the Bush years were. How soon we have forgotten.)
Hope. Was not that the so called banner from 'Democrats' during their endless waa waa about Bush.
To be fair to Democrats, Senator Obama voted for the Telecom Immunity bill several months prior to the 2008 election. Whatever "hope and change" he was offering, his followers knew it probably wouldn't include reversing the erosion of the 4th amendment. They voted for him anyway so I don't know why they would hate him for this.
You really think they won't pass laws against encryption?
They might (UK proves this sort of thing can happen), but my guess at this point, is that they probably won't. The fact that the genie is out of the bottle, is a little too in-your-face for politicians to pretend to be ignorant of.
The biggest problem with anti-crypto laws is that they're not really enforcible. It's not feasible to sniff the backbones, identify ciphertext for which you don't have a key in escrow somewhere (just think about how that would have to be implemented, and what it would mean for how the law would be written; it means the law can't require that LE only obtain the keys with court orders), and then figure out who is responsible for that packet and send cops to their house to arrest them. Uh uh. An anti-crypto law would only be used just like gun laws: it's just another charge to throw on to the pile of prosecution once the government has already singled someone out. It's not something that can be enforced on its own.
Furthermore, if software people ever get their shit together (which for some reason almost never happens) these kinds of laws can be preemptively subverted. While all personal communication ought to use authenticated connections to negotiate the session key, in many cases (I'm thinking of interactive things like phones and chat, not email) you can throw on another layer, where DIffie-Helman is used to create a key which exists only in memory on-the-spot for which can't be recreated. (Think about how Zphone works, except imagine there was a layer of (user-optional) authentication too, to prevent MitM.)
If software comes with this kind of thing automatically turned on by default, then all users would be unwittingly violation of an anti-crypto law for which there's no possible key escrow. When you have that kind of situation, the law cannot survive. It's one thing to have an unjust law, but another to have an unjust law that everyone, including the judge, is violating several times per day.
But this stuff needs to be in the protocols and the software that is running on user's computers, not in services like what RIM offers. We have a big problem right now where things are over-bundled, causing the line between products and services to be blurry from most people's point of view (e.g. some people say, "I have a Verizon phone."). In addition to securing protocols, waking up from the illusion that is caused by bundling should be another high priority.
Slashdot Mirror
My physics intuition (which unsurprisingly probably doesn't work well on things the size of galaxies) tells me that even if I magically started with a straight-line structure, it would immediately start to become curved, as the closer-to-the-center stars orbit faster than the further out ones. No? How can these straight structures exist? And yeah, now that I think of it, that goes for "bar" galaxies too. WTF?
My guess is that's what happened (or Hogan believes it happened or virtually happened with a handshake or whatever). There's just no reasonable way this case could be over IP law. It's just gotta be over some kind of don't-use-my-idea or non-complete agreement, and the dispute will be over what was really agreed to by who.
"Sir, about that planet, we've detected a flash of light."
"Captain, are you telling me they're testing nucular bombs?"
"No sir, just a flash of l--"
"Do you have any idea what the public will do when they discover the aliens are testing WMDs and we have no plan for dealing with them?"
"Sir, I was mistaken. There was no flash of light."
"Not good enough, captain."
"Sir, I was mistaken. There was no planet."
"That's more like it."
Surprise surprise, people are confused about truth verses illusion. If I made my money on religion, though, I wouldn't be talking about this in public. If you encourage people to ask questions like "How do I know if what I see in this picture is real?" they might ask the same question about other things too. Sshhhh.
No, that's just it. It doesn't make for easy conversation; it makes for confusing and ambiguous conversation, like talking about Toyotas vs cars would, if someone arbitrarily and unilaterally defined car as meaning only automobiles that were built in England. PC used to mean personal computer, and then it meant IBM-PC-compatible computer, generally drifted to meaning generic x86 computer (which is almost the same thing, but has become less stringent, and then it meant Windows, while the x86 definition got refined to include all x86 machines except for the ones built by a single manufacturer (Apple). It's gone through too many meanings (and forks!), so when someone says it, you don't know which one they mean unless you're already intimately familiar with the context.
When talking about computers in general (such that mainframes might not be off-topic), PC usually means personal computer; when talking about games, it usually means Windows; when talking about Macs, sometimes it means generic x86 and sometimes it means Windows. But when you come at the conversation from a different direction or from a gray area (e.g. you're comparing Linux gaming with console gaming) then it's totally ambiguous and you have to assume it means both until someone says something that (to you) obviously only refers to one of them, and then you say, "ah, you were talking about Windows and didn't mean to ask or imply anything about OpenBSD" and then someone else says "no, we're still ambiguous at this point," and then you have a flamewar and whatever the original subject was, is forgotten by then.
The best thing to do is either only use it by its original meaning, or kill the word. And since abused words can't ever be reclaimed (e.g. "hacker", "bricked", etc) they must be humanely slaughtered.
I followed the link but couldn't find the part where the Facebook founder said (or implied) its ok. (Not saying you're wrong; I just didn't find it.) Got a quote?
The idea that ok things should be required and not-ok things should be illegal, is pretty crazy. Tolerance and advocacy are totally different things. I hate rap and county music but I've never asked for a law against them, and if someone tries to pass such a law, I'll be on the same side as the rednecks and homeboys, just as I expect them to be there for me if the PMRC comes after metal again. ;-) The question isn't under which circumstances marijuana is good or bad for someone, the question is whether or not it's a good idea to use force against someone who uses it in a way that you wouldn't.
The real mixed message is this: On one hand, you have the government saying that it's not ok to use violence against other people without provocation (laws against kidnapping), and on the other hand, you have the government saying it's ok to use violence against other people without provocation (no laws against arresting drug users). This country has lost sight of what the government is for, so we've got it doing all kinds of psycho self-contradicting things. Ending prohibition is a step toward making it less psycho and making the message more consistent. And that consistent message will be: the purpose of government is to protect its citizens' liberty.
The primary way it'll improve national security is by lowering the imports, since domestic production will be more competitive when it is less threatened by the government. (And then on top of that, you can layoff or re-purpose some LEOs so they can do more productive things.) A wealthier country is a more secure one. It's own citizens become less of a threat to it, and it can afford to spend more on defense too. It's just win win win across the board.
The secondary way it works, is that it takes wealth away from gangsters (prohibition isn't exactly a subsidy for criminals, but it's a lot like one). Fewer powerful criminals in Mexico means a much more secure Mexico, less violence in the border area, etc. Plenty of security benefits will rub off on the US.
There's another way it improves national security too, but you have to look at things a certain way that I'm not sure everyone shares, so it's not as objective as the above ways. A nation is its people, so things which threaten those people (such as the nation's government putting them in jail for no good reason) is a national security threat. i.e. If we end prohibition, then the "attacks" (where citizens are suddenly deprived of their liberty) end. Think of the resources we're spending to launch and sustain the attacks (paying cops and prison guards) and defending ourselves from the attacks (paying public defenders). We could be spending that on defending the nation instead of having the nation attack itself.
There might be reasons for prohibition, but it comes at a cost and security is part of that.
Intent is exactly what I was getting at. (What part of "with the knowledge and consent of the owner" made you think I was blowing off intent?!) They intended for the car owner to have possession of the bug. You can argue they intended the car owner to have temporary or conditional possession of the bug, but if they don't communicate that, then what's a reasonable thing for the finder to assume? My point is that it sure as hell wasn't lost, misplaced, planted by mistake, etc. If you look at it on the lost-to-gift spectrum, it's a lot closer to a gift.
If you find a phone in a bar, it's reasonable for the finder to assume it's probably lost -- it's there by mistake -- and we expect the finder to try to return it to its owner. This is not only a law, but it's also just plain courteous and fits in with the ethic of "don't be an asshole; give back the phone because you would want someone to give back your phone."
If you find something that is deliberately planted, it's not lost. Bringing up the if-unclaimed-after-30-days rule is just total bullshit. Someone didn't just make a mistake or misplace it; they deliberately gave up control of the item and (informed and consenting) accepted a significant risk that they wouldn't get it back.
On top of that, they performed an act that is unambiguously hostile (like someone knowingly giving you HIV); courtesy is the wrong attitude to take and the best ethics are to harm the enemy however you can. And if there happens to be law that says you have to give it back, it sure as hell ain't the same law that says you have to give a lost phone back, and it's a law that will be far outside most laymens' day-to-day experiences.
It's just an utterly, completely different thing -- in character, in intent, in every way -- than the lost phone example, and the phone comparison is without merit.
If at the moment you're getting our of my car, you get a pensive look, then pull a CD out of your pocket, put it into my player, nod when it starts playing, and leave without a word (no "you keep this") is that a gift? Maybe that's not your intent, but if we end up fighting over that CD later, I bet most people will side with me.
Heh heh, you almost got me there. You're right. Ah, but it's an "interest." I can't help but wonder if most givers have "an interest" in not giving, but then do it anyway. If they really wanted to know where the device is, they wouldn't surrender control of it. They chose to sacrifice that interest for some other gain, like any other giver. I would even go as far as to say that the intent of the putting the GPS in the device, is something other than to track their inventory so that it doesn't get lost in the wrong part of their warehouse. It's not for "shrinkage" control.
Dude, we're heading for a world without mead!
That will never happen, because it doesn't have the capacity to "send" you anywhere. It can only display advisory informat--wait, this is going to be wired into the car's control system? NOOOOOO!!
These seeming isolated incidents of "gate" abuse are really all part of the Gategate conspiracy.
Wire it up to someone else's battery, and now you're committing theft of services. It's one thing to bug someone's car, but to have them pay to operate it? I doubt any of the statues or rulings that say warrants aren't necessary, have legalized that.
That phone was lost. The owner did not intend to transfer ownership.
This device was placed with the knowledge and consent of the owner at that time. Do you have to make an attempt to return a gift?
If I place something in your car, not accidentally leaving it behind or mistakenly leaving the wrong item, why wouldn't you be the owner? Sure, it might not be worth fighting about if I really badly want it back and you're not rich/motivated enough to fight, but assuming you went through with it to the point of getting a jury, then it's probably going to remain yours.
They took out some parts related to fighting piracy (e.g. disconnecting pirates) but left the parts that are the least related to piracy and has the greatest impact on non-pirate-related uses:
So still: you can't make or sell a Bluray player, a cable box, etc. You'll be allowed to use these devices (except in US) but there won't be any legal way to get to the point of having one. Lame.
If your country adopts ACTA as it is, your country is still going to adopt the very worst part of DMCA.
..tach CEOs are disinterested third parties with no ulterior motive. They're not after some ludicrously expensive contract for several years, combined with building a new terrible legacy and network effects which basically cause a lock-in for long after the original contract. Finally someone you can trust!
[squints at monitor]
Hey waitaminute. These are the guys who run companies that only make tachometers, right?
*sigh* Two hecklers and no funny mod. Ok, I won't quit my day job.
That's why my passphrase is "I committed the crime."
Oops, now I need to change the passphrase on my luggage. Maybe I'll change it to "is my little secret" and when the keystone kops come after me, I'll quip a cryptic comment about Quine.
Interesting that 50*log(36)/log(2)=258. My guess is that he has software which obviously uses a 256 bit key, and someone had to explain what "256 bits" means to some layman, and they said, "It's about the same amount of information as 50 letters-or-numbers."
Munroe, who often gets so much stuff right, got the Crypto Nerd's Imagination all wrong. There are three other (much more plausible) panels he could have drawn.
1) One panel would say, "The laptop is encrypted. I wish I knew where to find the guy I stole it from, so that I could ask him the password or beat it out of him with my $5 wrench. Surely he'll come back to the coffee shop if I sit here and wait long en-- Oh goody, he's here. SHIT, he has a $10 wrench!!"
2) One panel would say, "Half the country's packets are encrypted. We're not going to know what everyone is doing on the internet, until we hire a fifty thousand people and buy them each a wrench and give them a house-to-house route. [Later:] SHIT, the budget didn't get approved, because the press made a big stink after we threatened the 207th person."
3) One panel would say, "Muahahah, we got his laptop. Quick, let's get the info off it really fast and then slip it back into his office before he gets back from lunch. He'll never know!! Shit, it's encrypted. Go get the wrench. No, wait. SHIT. If we threaten him with the wrench into revealing the key, he'll know what we did."
Everybody knows that once people with greater force and the willingness to use it come after you, you're fucked. You're either going to give up your secrets, suffer their wrath, or (unlikely but possible) get a bigger bully to fight them off. That's not the problem that crypto solves. The other scenarios I just mentioned, though, it does solve, and it solves very well. If you're a crypto nerd and these aren't in your imagination, then you don't have much of an imagination.
As for Oliver Drage, a sneak-and-peek warrant would have failed. He knows they're investigating him, can talk to a lawyer, and defend himself as much as a government allows someone to do that. Without crypto, what might have happened?
Hi.
Skype sucks because it is closed, and no one knows how it handles the key exchange. If Skype were serious about security, they could still be proprietary but would at least be open about exactly how the encryption works, and they would also almost certainly have a way for users to be their own trusted introducers so that people could use it with confidence that there is no MitM.
But they don't, so they are very likely a trap. People have been bitching about this for many years, so if they weren't broken, they would have defended themselves by now.
From the headline, I thought he had died!
Aha, so that's why nobody is using Flash for video.
To be the same as Bush, Obama needs to start a new war, as unnecessary and expensive as Iraq. (Actually, he also needs to get Congress (including the opposing party) to agree that it's a good idea and fund it! That's how amazing the Bush years were. How soon we have forgotten.)
To be fair to Democrats, Senator Obama voted for the Telecom Immunity bill several months prior to the 2008 election. Whatever "hope and change" he was offering, his followers knew it probably wouldn't include reversing the erosion of the 4th amendment. They voted for him anyway so I don't know why they would hate him for this.
They might (UK proves this sort of thing can happen), but my guess at this point, is that they probably won't. The fact that the genie is out of the bottle, is a little too in-your-face for politicians to pretend to be ignorant of.
The biggest problem with anti-crypto laws is that they're not really enforcible. It's not feasible to sniff the backbones, identify ciphertext for which you don't have a key in escrow somewhere (just think about how that would have to be implemented, and what it would mean for how the law would be written; it means the law can't require that LE only obtain the keys with court orders), and then figure out who is responsible for that packet and send cops to their house to arrest them. Uh uh. An anti-crypto law would only be used just like gun laws: it's just another charge to throw on to the pile of prosecution once the government has already singled someone out. It's not something that can be enforced on its own.
Furthermore, if software people ever get their shit together (which for some reason almost never happens) these kinds of laws can be preemptively subverted. While all personal communication ought to use authenticated connections to negotiate the session key, in many cases (I'm thinking of interactive things like phones and chat, not email) you can throw on another layer, where DIffie-Helman is used to create a key which exists only in memory on-the-spot for which can't be recreated. (Think about how Zphone works, except imagine there was a layer of (user-optional) authentication too, to prevent MitM.)
If software comes with this kind of thing automatically turned on by default, then all users would be unwittingly violation of an anti-crypto law for which there's no possible key escrow. When you have that kind of situation, the law cannot survive. It's one thing to have an unjust law, but another to have an unjust law that everyone, including the judge, is violating several times per day.
But this stuff needs to be in the protocols and the software that is running on user's computers, not in services like what RIM offers. We have a big problem right now where things are over-bundled, causing the line between products and services to be blurry from most people's point of view (e.g. some people say, "I have a Verizon phone."). In addition to securing protocols, waking up from the illusion that is caused by bundling should be another high priority.