On Thu, 7 Nov 1996 16:43:23 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
* "Legitimate needs." The whole notion Peter raises of banning cryptography is fraught with problems. Are businesses to be told that all communications are to be in the clear? Or is Peter's point that some form of GAK will be used?
I'd love to see the government try to tell big business that they can't protect, say, electronic transactions. That'd get a lot of rented senators in action...
(If the latter, then of course we are back to an even better form of "stego" than stego itself: superencrypt before using GAK. Unless the government samples packets randomly and does what they say they will do to open a GAKked packet--e.g., get a court order, go to the escrow key holders, etc.--then how will they know if a message is superencrypted? And what if a GAKked message contains conventional _codes_? Are shorthand codes such as business have long used--"The rain in Rome is warm this month"--to be illegal?)
Also: "Am I being investigated for any crime?" "Then how do you know it's been superencrypted - I thought you could only get access with a warrant?" # Chris Adams <adamsc@io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp # <cadams@acucobol.com> | send mail with subject "send PGPKEY" "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them." --- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)