At 09:17 AM 7/18/96 -0400, Clay Olbon II wrote:
My point was not that govts want to escrow communication keys, it was that this is appearing more and more in commercial products marketed to businesses. I run the computer system for a small office and I would rather not see employee email - maybe I am just naive. However, there obviously is a demand for this type of product. It must come from either a lack of understanding of crypto, or a freeh-style authoritarianism on the part of corporate executives. I wouldn't rule either one out. If it is the latter, I'm not sure there is anything we can do.
A larger organization feels that it has to maintain control over its systems by bureaucratic methods. Smaller organizations can figure out by direct experience whether someone is trustworthy or not. This is not restricted to encryption software, however. Large organizations attempt to determine what their employees should be doing with their time as well. This method of social organization works fine when mass producing large quantities of identical physical products. It is, however, incompatible with small-run, custom production of goods and services in which individual imagination and knowledge play a big part. In the current environment, management can't predict in advance what is the optimal thing that the "workers" should be doing at any given time. What we call "forcing contracts" (you do this, I pay you) are replaced in the modern age with "incentive contracts" (you produce a desired outcome, I pay you). This means that as time goes on many businesses approach closer and closer to the one-man firm model in which everyone buys and sells everyone else's services on the spot market. This didn't work in the past because of the friction of the transaction costs involved but those costs have declined dramatically. In this environment, others don't care how much time you surf the web or what you encrypt as long as your output is of the desired quality and quantity. Indeed, the average firm size has been declining in the US for 15 years or so. Companies may attempt to resist this dissolution and they may attempt to maintain traditional controls on their workers but if it is true that the Nets make it possible for the greater efficiencies of the one-man firm (no downtime paid by the buyer) to come into play, new small firms will eat the dinosaurs. DCF