At 07:34 AM 9/5/2001 -0700, John Young wrote:
Thanks for the cites of Gatti.
Greg's disclosure of C2Net's sales is appreciated. Perhaps not surprising. What would be surprising, maybe, would be disclosure as ZKS did in its earliest days, of reporting on meetings C2Net was having with law enforcement officials about its technology.
Didn't happen - at least not within my knowledge. I don't think we'd have been willing to have one, given our crypto export control stance (and paranoia about law enforcement) at that point. Given the state of the law at that time (lots of this was before Patel's rulings in _Bernstein_, during the ITAR period before BXA took over crypto regs, and way before the export liberalization), we weren't at all sure we weren't going to be arrested and made examples of, cf. Dmitry Sklyarov. Law enforcement never asked for a meeting, probably because of (a) ignorance of or disinterest in the technology, or (b) if they did understand it, they also understood that we were essentially selling Apache-SSL (from a technical standpoint), so if they wanted a copy to beat up on, they could build it themselves - they didn't need an RSA license to legitimize their internal/research copies. We did get a moderate amount of interest in the remailers/anonymizers which ran at C2 in the early days, and later were run somewhere else but whose domain name was held by C2; callers on that topic generally got a nice long explanation of how remailers work, how we didn't know the identity of the person running the remailer nor its physical location, why we supported remailers as free speech tools, and how as a provider of DNS lookups we never had any logs of activity in the first place to disclose, whether or not we had wanted to, court order or not. Complainers pretty much went away after getting the explanation, save for one publisher of avant-garde fonts who never did give up trying to cajole or scare us into giving out the information we didn't have, and/or shutting down DNS to the privacy stuff. I think ZKS' technology is more interesting and more threatening to law enforcement than our web crypto tools were - there's still not a lot of evil or disorder that goes on related to, literally, the web - I get the impression that law enforcement is a lot more interested in IRC, email, and other communications which are either more personal and immediate, or much less personal and immediate (like Usenet). Web sites are still relatively static, which means their providers are pretty easily identified, which means not so much bad stuff happens there. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@well.com "We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids