official secrets act usa sorry my news reader doesn t seem to know how to copy a subject header this tracks the thread why people don t need strong crypto the atomic energy act of expressly forbids thinking about building nuclear devices while i was in grad school a friend of mine got a security clearance to work on the defense for the progressive magazine he found lots of articles which were public domain removed from the local engineering library madison wisconsin so the lawyers sent him all over the states to other libraries to show that the information in the article was already public what pissed everyone off was a local underground paper went and published the article anyway it had been precensored by the feds that s what this was all about so the judge declared the case moot the atomic energy act of has never been tested in court from my discussions with several people familiar with the case only other times has this preemptive clause been used in every case the people simply did what they felt like and courts tossed the cases out for all intents and purposes the government does have precidence for declaring things classified after it has been published while i was working on star wars this happened to me my clearance was in the works and i developed a method for tracking particle beams it was good enough to classify so i was no longer allowed to work on it a friend from canada was in the same boat he developed a method to compute stripping cross sections but because the subject was classified he was not allowed to present his own paper at a conference he later published it in an open journal without problems when the going gets wierd the wierd turn pro the feds can do whatever they want whenever they feel like it and they will make up rules to let themselves get away with it since the mass media can t tell the difference between a joke and the real thing like ranch appocolypse for the waco massacre don t count on them to help spread the word about their loss of freedom the government can make strong crypto illegal so what since the government does not obey any of its own rules why should we patience persistence truth reality dvader hemp imi hep anl gov dr mike home mrosing igc org
