There is a First Amendment right to speak in a encrypted way.... The right to speak P.G.P. is like the right to speak Navajo. The Government has no particular right to prevent you from speaking in a technical manner even if it is inconvenient for them to understand.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of the right to communicate privately using encryption, equating it with the right to use a language unrecognized by the government.
Eben Moglen argues that encryption is a crucial form of expression and communication, akin to speaking a language that is not understood by the government. By invoking the First Amendment, he asserts that individuals possess the fundamental right to communicate in ways that may not be easily understood by authorities, highlighting the significance of privacy and technical speech in a democratic society.
In practice
During a conference on digital rights, one might quote Moglen to advocate for stronger encryption laws.
The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?
I have seen women who are very interested in tech finish their graduate or undergraduate degrees, but then choose not to pursue a career in tech because they're not sure they want to spend the next 20-30 years in an industry that's very male dominated.
Usability rules the web. Simply stated, if the customer can't find a product, then he or she will not buy it.
If you go back back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
I wanted to create a toolkit which I would have wanted as an entrepreneur to use these principles of psychology in product design. Some startups totally forget the trigger. In some, the action is too complicated. Others don't have a variable reward, which maintains mystery.
We know in our hearts that technology at its best should make us feel even more human than we currently feel. Sometimes it makes us feel less human.
As our technology evolves, we will have the capacity to reach new, ever-increasing depths. The question is what kind of technology, in the end, do we want to deploy in the far reaches of the ocean? Tools of science, ecology and documentation, or the destructive tools of heavy industry?
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