Legal Hacks
Legal Hacks
[Megan sits at her computer, Cueball standing behind her.] Megan: Another ISP's filtering content. Cueball: Thank God for Crypto.
[Cueball stands alone; Megan is presumably off-panel left.] Cueball: It wasn't that long ago that RSA was illegal to export. Classified a munition.
[Megan, sitting in her chair, is looking back towards Cueball, presumably off-panel right.] Megan: You know, I think the crypto community took the wrong side in that fight. We should've lobbied to keep it counted as a weapon. Cueball: Why?
[She is now turned around in the chair looking at Cueball, who is in-panel again.] Megan: Once they get complacent, we break out the second amendment. [Cueball has his hand on his chin, contemplatively.] Cueball: ...Damn.

Megan notices that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is blocking access to some webpages. Cueball is thankful that cryptography offers a way around such censorship.
Encryption, the study and use of which is known as "cryptography," or "crypto" for short, is the art of transmitting messages that can only be read by the intended receiver(s) by using mathematical techniques to conceal ("encrypt") the data in the message. One common and effective way to encrypt messages is the RSA algorithm , which is based on the difficulty of integer factorization for products of two prime numbers.
Being able to share unbreakable codes and decrypt other people's codes gives countries a military advantage - for example, in World War II, the Americans and British were often able to figure out where a German attack would be coming and send reinforcements there, because they had cracked the German codes . Because of this, the United States government initially tried to keep the mathematical details of strong encryption algorithms (including RSA) inside the country by classifying the algorithms as a weapon. It is a crime to share certain kinds of weapons technology with other countries without permission. Amateur and professional cryptographers, angry about the attempt to restrict their work, lobbied the government to change the rule and stop treating cryptography as a weapon, in part so that they could continue to collaborate with colleagues overseas, and in part because they wanted the ability to pass secret messages that the government could not easily decrypt. The export restrictions were gradually loosened and would have mostly been lifted by the year 2000.
In the comic, Megan makes the provocative and counter-intuitive point that perhaps the cryptographic community could have best ensured easy access to the RSA technique by *allowing* the government to treat RSA as a weapon, and then, once everyone is certain that RSA is a weapon, invoking the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution , commonly known as the " right to bear arms " amendment (that is, the right to own and use weapons). In other words, if RSA were a weapon, it would be granted constitutional protections.
This interpretation is likely a reference to the very strong social and political movements opposing arms control in the United States.  The legal basis for this movement is the position that most or all laws prohibiting private ownership of firearms (and potentially other weapons), violate the Second Amendment. Accordingly, publicly referring to the Second Amendment tends to imply opposition to gun control. Megan's implication is that, by connecting RSA to this debate, crypto enthusiasts would gain a large group of unlikely allies who are strongly committed to keeping weapons legal and unrestricted. They could also invoke the legal cover of the Constitution, allowing them to fight restrictions in court.
Cueball is surprised and impressed by this point, and pauses to contemplate Megan's strategy.
It should be noted that there are major weaknesses in this argument. The Second Amendment only applies in the United States, meaning that imports and exports of munitions could still be banned. It might provide some protections against the ability of the US government to restrict RSA within US borders, but it could still be restricted in other countries, potentially hampering its use in global communications.
The title text claims that this is a reasonable interpretation of the Constitution, because cryptography (a modern weapon) is analogous to muskets and cannons (the weaponry in use in the 1780s, when the Second Amendment was drafted). As evidence for the analogy, the title text points out that Jefferson would have been a big fan of cryptography, which is plausible, because President Thomas Jefferson (the 3rd President of the United States) was an amateur scientist who enjoyed studying a very wide variety of fields (in fact, he invented the Jefferson disk , an encryption device that was quite advanced for its time). The point is somewhat facetious, because it is hard to imagine a modern technique that Jefferson would not "be totally into." Also, the mere assertion that an early President would have been a fan of a technique is not very good evidence that the technique would be legally permitted by a particular Amendment.
[Megan sits at her computer, Cueball standing behind her.] Megan: Another ISP's filtering content. Cueball: Thank God for Crypto.
[Cueball stands alone; Megan is presumably off-panel left.] Cueball: It wasn't that long ago that RSA was illegal to export. Classified a munition.
[Megan, sitting in her chair, is looking back towards Cueball, presumably off-panel right.] Megan: You know, I think the crypto community took the wrong side in that fight. We should've lobbied to keep it counted as a weapon. Cueball: Why?
[She is now turned around in the chair looking at Cueball, who is in-panel again.] Megan: Once they get complacent, we break out the second amendment. [Cueball has his hand on his chin, contemplatively.] Cueball: ...Damn.
