I just saw a news story that bears on one of the perpetual questions on this newsgroup: can you be compelled to turn over your encryption key? In Doe vs. U.S. (93-523), the Supreme Court declined to rule on
Just thought that I'd throw in my somewhat unrelated $.02... Here at Penn State University, a hacker/crakcer/whatever was caught on one of our mainframes back in 89 or 90 and he had some files encrypted with DES on his minidisk. The authorities asked him for the passphrase and told him that if he refused that they'd crack it with a Cray in something like six hours. He ultimately gave in but I wonder if it would have been legal for the authorities to brute force a passphrase on the file...this is relatively unbroken legal ground. Of course, this is DES which was made weak enough to be breakable. PGP is a much different story. -- --**--**-- R X T 1 0 9 @ E M A I L . P S U . E D U --**--**-- Bob Torres Use an electronic envelope... plato@phantom.com Support the use of cryptography. PGP public key available..