On Sun, 6 Oct 1996, jim bell wrote: [...]
Sure, such a capacity is small compared with the total Internet traffic, but I assume that most traffic could be excluded from recording if its source was known, etc. They'd exclude anything from "probably-okay" web pages, they'd trim space-hogging graphics, etc. "Just the facts, ma'am." Call the whole thing "retroactive-selective-drift-net-fishing," if you will.
Yes, but because of the fact that they can't store everything, and will have to be selective, many holes can be found. This is why we have stego.
Once this data is stored away the government would determine (perhaps years after the fact?) which data they want to decrypt, possibly based on crimes committed long after the data was recorded. This information might reveal contacts, etc. Obviously they have no prayer of doing real-time analysis. Even so, it makes it far more practical to do the equivalent of drift-net fishing if they can exclude 99.9999%+ of the traffic from their decryption attempts. 56-bit encryption doesn't look so ominous to them in this case.
But most of the time it would take them long enough to decrypt that the statute of limitations for the crime has worn out. So unless they can do it real-time, or at least within a _few_ years, it becomes useless except for defimation of the suspect's character.
Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com
--Deviant You scratch my tape, and I'll scratch yours.