I couldn't believe it, either, when I read a recent article from Reason magazine which proclaims that John Ashcroft was once the good guy when it came to civil liberties and John Kerry was the bad guy.

The year was ... sometime in the 1990s, and the U.S. government was attempting to pass a bill which would have required that the government be able to break any private encryption. "Then it was Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) who argued alongside the ACLU in favor of the individual’s right to encrypt messages and export encryption software," writes John Berlau from a dateline somewhere in a parallel universe. Is it really true? John Ashcroft, the man who brought us the USA-PATRIOT Act, the man who sued Oregon because he didn't want them to be able to have assisted suicide, the man who launched a War on Pornography, was once on the side of good? What's next: John Kerry on the side of evil?

Yes! Kerry was in favor of encryption control back in those days, along with John McCain. The two of them pushed for some mechanism whereby the government would have all the keys for all private encryption, or the keys would be put into a third-party "key escrow," obtainable only by court order.

Whoa!