People So Dumb That They Ought to Be Watered Twice-Weekly; DoJ Edition

US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Barbara McQuade, who uttered this gobsmacking pit of stupidity:

"I think it would be reasonable to ban the import of open-source encryption software."

Jeebers. Good luck with that.

See, there is this thing called the "Internet", Babs. You may have heard of it. Our own government has spent large amounts of money developing software for people to use in order to evade the restrictions of overbearing governments. It's not as though code traveling on the Internet fills out customs declarations. Anyone with a modicum of computer skills can get the stuff.

And I'm not even touching First Amendment issues. Code is speech, at least one court has held that.

Still, Babs may get what she wants, if DiFi and her ilk have their way. They're pretty much a toxic mix of being both professionally paranoid and technologically illiterate, so unless the tech community stays on top of them and watches them as though they were jewel thieves at a damond expo, we'll get stuck with some pretty awful laws.

Because when it comes to freedom, there isn't a right or a liberty that DiFi and her pack of slavering security goons doesn't want to restrict. Except maybe the right to give money to politicians.