technologists should be doing what comes naturally: inventing technology that outpaces the law and could even make new laws irrelevant.

“They’re much better off doing what they do best, writing code,” says Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank in San Francisco. “That’s where their competitive advantage lies.”

Put another way, who made a bigger difference: Yet another letter-scribbling activist or Phil Zimmermann, who wrote the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption software? How about Shawn Fanning, the man who created Napster? Or the veterans of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which oversees the fundamental protocols of the Internet?

Read the rest in Declan McCullagh’s CNet article.