<In mail Evidence Inc. said:>
No, the FCC interpretation was that Amateurs have an obligation to make sure that all transmissions from their stations conform to the requirements of the FCC Part 97 rules. Broadcasting encrypted communcations on amateur radio is itself a violation of the rules. That's right!! the government has already banned encryption.... on Ham Radio.
Not entirely true... The rules governing amateur radio operators says that you can not use any secret codes or ciphers whose intent is to obscure meaning. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ASCII is a code but it is used in packet and such to convey information in an agreed upon format, not to obscure the meaning of the message. My contention is that a signature, while encrypted, is not encrypted to obscure the meaning. It says it is a sig, it is a sig, and contains no other information that is not readily available (email addresses can be included, but it is retrievable with a commonly available program PGP.) Oh, and don't let the 2 by 3 format of my callsign mislead you. It's my original callsign... I didn't want to bother with making everyone learn a new one. [If anyone has specific ham radio questions not relating to crypto, please feel free to write email to me.] -- Tantalus Inc. Jim Sewell Amateur Radio: KD4CKQ P.O. Box 2310 Programmer Internet: jims@mpgn.com Key West, FL 33045 C-Unix-PC Compu$erve: 71061,1027 (305)293-8100 PGP via email on request. 1K-bit Fingerprint: 8E 14 68 90 37 87 EF B3 C4 CF CD 9A 3E F9 4A 73