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Honest question, why does it have “legitimate educational use”? For me that’s not a given. You could teach how to build a bomb or how to cook meth. I’m sure there are a lot of students who would benefit from that kind of knowledge and would use it for good. I’m also sure that we would have a bunch of Walter White wanna bes. How is this different?

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> You could teach how to build a bomb or how to cook meth…

Professionals legally create explosives (military, demolition, mining etc) and literally “cook” meth (the brand name for legal prescription methamphetamine is Desoxyn in the US). These necessary and legitimate jobs require educated individuals.

I'm sure somebody asked how the model train railroad club at MIT was for legitimate educational use, but it helped lead to modern computing. We want to have a bunch of americans who understand crypto- the underlying technology- as a long-term competitive edge. Generally we trust the people who go down these paths to be fairly responsible, and MIT as well as JHU are examples of long-term responsible exploration of things that may not seem to be legitimate educational use in the short-term.

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