Eric Murray wrote:
John McCormac writes:
[about Irish crypto legislation]
<quote> ยท In order to enable lawful access to encrypted data, legislation will be enacted to oblige users of encryption products to release, in response to a lawful authorisation, either plaintext which verifiably relates to the encrypted data in question or the keys or algorithms necessary to retrieve the plaintext. Appropriate sanctions will be put in place in respect of failure to comply. </quote>
This seems to be carefully considered in that the user could be asked to prove the encrypted document contains the encrypted form of the plaintext. But the most important thing is that a search warrant would be required to force the user to give up the plaintext or the key.
It says "lawful authorisation" not "search warrant".
That means that sometime later they can go back and pass another law that says that "lawful authorisation" for forcing one to reveal one's plaintext or keys is something much less stringent than a search warrant. Most proposed US crypto regulations have similar weasel-words.
Yep Eric, I think that most people have jumped the gun here on this one. These are not the actual regulations. They are only part of a framework proposal so the eventual legislation could be lightyears removed from these principles. (In fact given that most of the discussions between Ira Magaziner and the Irish government were carried out in secret, I think that the eventual legislation will be riddled with loopholes. Guess we may have become the 51st state and we didn't even know. :-) ) The problem is that most of the journos who wrote about it are relatively clueless on the crypto aspect of things. There was some input from Electronic Frontier Ireland (Irish version of EFF) on the principles so that is a good thing. Regards...jmcc -- ******************************************** John McCormac * Hack Watch News jmcc@hackwatch.com * 22 Viewmount, Voice: +353-51-873640 * Waterford, BBS&Fax: +353-51-850143 * Ireland http://www.hackwatch.com/~kooltek ******************************************** -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6 mQCNAzAYPNsAAAEEAPGTHaNyitUTNAwF8BU6mF5PcbLQXdeuHf3xT6UOL+/Od+z+ ZOCAx8Ka9LJBjuQYw8hlqvTV5kceLlrP2HPqmk7YPOw1fQWlpTJof+ZMCxEVd1Qz TRet2vS/kiRQRYvKOaxoJhqIzUr1g3ovBnIdpKeo4KKULz9XKuxCgZsuLKkVAAUX tCJKb2huIE1jQ29ybWFjIDxqbWNjQGhhY2t3YXRjaC5jb20+tBJqbWNjQGhhY2t3 YXRjaC5jb20= =sTfy -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----