[jfalcon]

I think the OP's write up misses one very important piece of the puzzle: Politics.

Newt Gingrich who was Speaker of the House at the time got embroiled in an incident that was recorded from a cell phone conversation. https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/01/13/tape/index.shtml

Now fast forward to a few years later with the Patriot Act and metadata controvery that Edward Snowden exposed... same shit, different day...

[jcrawfordor]

I did not know about the Newt Gingrich incident! That really adds some interest. There was definitely a lot of public attention to the issue at the time, and in some ways rightly so, but of course the resulting efforts were misdirected at a legislative fix. A point that I wanted to make in the article but I'm not sure I completely articulated was basically "this is what happens when Congress writes technical regulations," but of course this is far from the most egregious example of that.

The parallels to what we see today with pervasive surveillance and anti-encryption policy are significant, and it's frustrating to see how much less atwitter congress is about these issues today, when it's their own government doing the eavesdropping. As I make a jab towards in the article, I think that the people of today (and even the people of then) have given up on the privacy of their personal communications in some ways. I can't blame them, but it's clearly a problem that needs to be solved. Perhaps one way to look at it is this: in many ways, our communications on the internet have fewer privacy protections than our communications on landline phones. How did it get to be this way? History and policy, combined in an ugly way.

[jfalcon]

Yeah.

Let's put it this way: OKI900's and all that were around before 1992. And that phone was favoured because you could easily reprogram the ESN/NAM/MIN for cloning as well as turn it into a scanner by turning on it's speaker and had control of the frequency. It was a modder's dream to hack on. But the same could be done with Motorola phones with a few more button presses.

That was 1992.

1997: AMPS system is waning against D-AMPS and even that is getting pressure from a new standard - GSM - which is also digital and ENCRYPTED. Newt gets caught and to show what a great prick him and Bill Clinton were, they passed a law that was obsolete before it was even passed into law.

https://www.wired.com/1997/11/ears-of-the-airwaves/

---

This is why the election system, process of creating lawmakers (congress) as well as judicial system is retarded. The time lag doesn't stop the flash pan crime trends nor does it do anything to improve the situation due to the abuse of absurd laws like this one. This law is rendered null and void by technology long before it was ever enacted...

[jfalcon]

Well probably not so much the previous link... but this is an article that brings it all together from around that time:

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Popular-Communications...

Page 14 for "H.R. 2369 and The ARRL"

[mschuster91]

> Newt Gingrich who was Speaker of the House at the time got embroiled in an incident that was recorded from a cell phone conversation.

I wonder why it's always the same names that crop up as the reason for bullshit regulations.

[jfalcon]

The 1990's were big on passing a metric fuckton of laws impacting technology as that is when most of the people started getting "online" as it were.

Wargames came out in 1984. It took about 2 years for there to be a law against computer intrusion (hacking). 18 USC 1030. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

But it got most of it's teeth in the 90's. Newt and Bill pretty much ran the 90's. Along with Janet Reno and the rest of them. People may have happy memories of the 90's but for "hackers", it was a terrible time as people were passing bad laws with little info. It's only gotten marginally better over time due to people gaining better comprehension of technology - yet somehow we haven't caught up with our own privacy invasions as a whole. (ie: GDPR and data collection)

[mschuster91]

> It's only gotten marginally better over time due to people gaining better comprehension of technology - yet somehow we haven't caught up with our own privacy invasions as a whole.

It's time for both the US and the EU to vote out all the incompetent morons of our parliaments...

[Fjolsvith]

Signed into law by someone else.