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File Encryption - now effectively outlawed in the US?

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IainB:
@f0dder
...This thread is about a political issue...
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-f0dder (April 04, 2017, 12:05 PM)
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Is it? Is that all it is? To be frank, I'm not sure what the heck it is.
I must admit, when I started this thread it was merely to describe a disturbing report:
Disturbing report from Falkvinge.net:
With shock appeals ruling, the United States has effectively outlawed file encryption
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.) ...
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-IainB (March 28, 2017, 10:42 PM)
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I didn't really know what to make of it.
To me, it seemed to be a legal issue where a US appeals court had apparently, by overturning a prior judgement, effectively outlawed file encryption by default.

I'm ignorant of US judicial processes, but from the report it seemed as though the appeals court had thereby stepped outside of their boundaries to make some kind of a new law - though lawmaking is not within the bailiwick of an appeals court.

As I wrote:
It looks like the report might be correct. File encryption has effectively been outlawed - just like that.
I didn't think that a judicial system could do that.

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 - and that's the really worrying thing about this.

The thing is, if this decision/law sticks and does not itself get overturned, then not just Americans but people in other nations may find themselves to be affected by such a law, There could be potentially huge ramifications/consequences.
It's not a good look at all. It reeks of creeping statism.

This creep seems to have been going on for years, and it's not as though things aren't bad enough in that regard already, as @40hz puts it (above):
Got news... Under existing US laws, you already may be arrested and held indefinitely - without trial or charges, and at the discretion of the executive - if you are deemed a threat to US national security. The determination is solely that of the executive and applies (according to the wording of the law) to any person of any nation, anywhere in the world, and at any time. And such action is not subject to any form of judicial review or oversight in any real sense of either word.
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-40hz (April 04, 2017, 07:37 PM)
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If one tried to respond to the situation as @c.gingerich put it:
I think I am going to have to start making file encryption apps.  8)
-c.gingerich (March 31, 2017, 08:56 AM)
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- then one may well discover that one risked being arrested for doing something illegal, or for inciting others to do something illegal, and it would be a federal offence. One could be putting a noose around one's neck. So that's not likely to help.

As the noose inevitably tightens, it may well be that the only recourse one has left is to impotently and passively rail against the state or its cruel laws, or impotently and passively make seemingly clever jokes and cartoon jokes about the very real predicament that citizens have been placed in by such laws. Which would be no recourse at all, of course, though at least in the latter case one could perhaps die with a smile on one's face, but by then that would probably have become a smile of happy release. The key word in all of this is probably the word "passively", as one well-known American thinker put it some time ago:
New pressures are causing ever more people to find their main satisfaction in their consumptive role rather than in their productive role. And these pressures are bringing forward such traits as pleasure-mindedness, self-indulgence, materialism, and passivity as conspicuous elements of the American character.
 -- Vance Packard
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He might have said that, but, not being an American, I couldn't possibly comment.
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"As lambs to the slaughter." - (Isaiah, Jeremiah)

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