this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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I mean, amateur radio was illegal to encrypt. That encryption ban could have theoretically also happened to the internet with just a few changes in legislation in a different timeline.

If, say the US and rest of North America, and the European Countries, along with Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, basically if most of the democratic world somehow in an alternate timeline just went batshit crazy and become authoritarian. What would the internet even look like. Would the internet even exist?

I mean, the US was supposedly a liberal democracy tried to ban PGP. A full fledged authoritarian US would've imprisoned many of those PGP and Free Software authors. HTTPS would've have a government root certificate on every computer, phone, tablet, smartwatch. Signal would've been illegal...

Is this alt-timeline too far fetched?

I mean its not even too late for this to happen starting like right now 2025, right?

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[โ€“] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I mean, amateur radio was illegal to encrypt

Was? I'm not familiar with a jurisdiction that presently allows licensed amateur radio operators to send encrypted or even obfuscated messages, with the unique exception of control-and-command instructions for amateur radio satellites. The whole exercise of ham radio is to openly communicate, with other frequencies and services available for encrypted comms and whatever else.

To be abundantly clear, I very much support encryption because it keeps good people honest and frustrates bad people. But it's hard to see how, for ham radio, encryption could be reconciled with the open and inviting spirit that has steered the radio community for over a century. In a lot of ways, hams were doing FOSS well before the acronym came into existence.

I have great admiration for the radio operators, precisely because when all the major infrastructure falters, it takes only a battery and a wire up a tree to recover some semblance of connectivity.

(this is entirely tangential to the OP's question, but I feel like hams deserve a good word every so often. Also, I understand that last weekend was ARRL Field Day in the USA)

Was?

Lol english is not my first language, I mean like: "encryption on amateur radio has already been illegal since the very beginning of its use" and obviously still illegal now

I mean I guess Ham Radio is just meant as sending postcards over the air.