<story><title>A Skype call in Ethiopia will now get you 15 years in prison</title><url>http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/14/ethiopia-skype-illegal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>raganwald</author><text>You can say what you like about the Constitution, but my tin foil hat says that the reason you don’t have laws like this in North America is because we have the technology and can afford to snoop on Skype, email, and so forth at scale. Ethiopia simply doesn’t have the money and/or know-how to monitor VoIP and Email at scale. There’s no salient difference in policy between them and us.&lt;p&gt;If we rewrite the law to say, “Thou shalt not use a communication mechanism we can’t monitor,” the behaviours of Ethiopia and US/Canada aren’t all that different.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>briandear</author><text>The Ethiopian decision isn&apos;t about monitoring, it&apos;s about protecting a monopoly. It&apos;s the same sort of thinking that has a certain political party opposing free trade agreements out of a fear that it will bankrupt manufacturers using inefficient processes. It&apos;s a classic case of violating Henry Hazlitt&apos;s economics lesson: &quot;The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.&quot;&lt;p&gt;While this prohibition has the immediate (apparent) consequence of &apos;saving&apos; the state-controlled telephone industry and ostensibly the jobs of its workers, it has a long run consequence of raising telecom costs for the rest of the country which results in less money available for other investment, resulting in a net-loss for the economy. This will also result in an expansion of the &quot;industry&quot; of catching illegal Skypers and prosecuting and incarcerating same -- thus magnifying the net economic loss. Instead of diverting government and/or private resources into innovation, those resources will instead be consumed by reactionism.&lt;p&gt;The Ethiopian policy is entirely about protectionism and has nothing to do with communications security.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Skype call in Ethiopia will now get you 15 years in prison</title><url>http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/14/ethiopia-skype-illegal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>raganwald</author><text>You can say what you like about the Constitution, but my tin foil hat says that the reason you don’t have laws like this in North America is because we have the technology and can afford to snoop on Skype, email, and so forth at scale. Ethiopia simply doesn’t have the money and/or know-how to monitor VoIP and Email at scale. There’s no salient difference in policy between them and us.&lt;p&gt;If we rewrite the law to say, “Thou shalt not use a communication mechanism we can’t monitor,” the behaviours of Ethiopia and US/Canada aren’t all that different.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fl3tch</author><text>You don&apos;t need fancy technology to snoop on people in America. All the companies are based in the US, so it&apos;s just a matter of the government compelling them to build the spy mechanisms into their products or turn over their data. Ethiopia is functionally doing the same thing (massive surveillance of its populace), but without the power to influence these companies, it just bans the products.</text></comment>