Sam Hartman writes: > Also, most of us are engineers. We'd like to know that what we are > doing is absolutely legal. We don't want to know that if some customs > agent really wants to make our life difficult they could and it would > be hard for us. "Your trip will be safe unless you manage to make > someone at the airport hate you," is not as reassuring as "our > algorithm has been proved correct." Unfortunately, many societies operate in just that way: there is a huge difference between the letter of the law and enforcement. And the law itself is so restrictive that nobody can actually obey it in real life. So everyone is effectively violating it to some effect, which means that the government (and its representatives) can selectively enforce it against anyone who displeases it, while allowing the majority to violate the law without consequences. This principle of selective enforcement allows a government to control a population far more effectively than mere laws alone. Virtually all countries engage in it to some extent, but it is far worse in some countries than in others. For example, it's much worse in France than it is in the United States. The general principle is to make sure that everyone is somehow doing something illegal, so that anyone can be arrested and thrown in jail if it becomes convenient to do so. The laws are designed to guarantee that nobody can fully obey them, and selective enforcement keeps the masses from complaining about them (most people equate non-enforcement with the absence of a law in the first place, even though they are two very different things). -- Anthony _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf