I hear occasional uproar from LE types about porno traffickers using strong crypto like PGP. [I've been known occasionally to say things for their shock value, but this time I'm quite serious.] ------------------------------ As a society wanting to limit the spread of porn, we should encourage those trafficking in porn to use strong crypto. 1. If two people are sending porn from one to another over the net, the net is so insecure that many people along the way could see it. The recipient field could be mistyped, as well. Either way, someone who doesn't want the porn could receive it and be offended. Strong crypto wrapping that porn protects the innocent accidental recipient from exposure to the porn. 2. If cops want to track down some pornographer (e.g., because he's dealing in child porn), the net and strong crypto provide two opportunities to the police: a) "no one on the net knows you're a dog" implies that police can pose as a fellow porn producer or consumer and get away with it more easily. b) strong crypto for communications between porn users encourages them to speak more freely. When one of the two is a police officer in disguise, that encourages the other (the suspect) to reveal more, making the investigation proceed more quickly. Knowing that the crypto is strong enough to keep government eavesdroppers out, the sender is given a false sense of security -- is distracted from thinking about the trustworthiness of the receiver while thinking about the security of the channel itself. 3. Encryption of porn would work against the kind of porn distribution found on the alt.binary.pictures.erotic... newsgroups. Encryption requires that recipients be identified. 4. Personal file encryption encourages individuals dealing with porn to encrypt and keep personal diaries which might contain evidence. Since PGP is subject to brute force passphrase attacks, this gives an attack which will open *some* of these diaries. Without the encryption, the suspect is less likely to keep the diary in the first place. This isn't a guaranteed opening into all such diaries. There is no such guarantee possible. Rather, this suggests that strong crypto has a chance to maximize the effective "take" by LE forces. These advantages are balanced against the possibility that there is some group of pornographers who communciate together, who are identified by the police, who would be wiretapped *and* who are not infiltrated -- and therefore whose conversations are unavailable to the police. The larger such a group, the less likely it will remain non-infiltrated, so these groups are probably very small. There might be some of these -- just as there might be a few pornographers who have diaries that are encrypted and unbreakable. However, strong crypto opens a number of opportunities for successful investigation -- and it's my guess that in the balance, strong crypto adds up as a net advantage to the police rather than a net drawback. - Carl +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme@acm.org http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | |PGP: E0414C79B5AF36750217BC1A57386478 & 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 | | ``Officer, officer, arrest that man! He's whistling a dirty song.'' | +---------------------------------------------- Jean Ellison (aka Mother) -+