At 3:18 PM 3/13/96, James A. Donald wrote:
Any crypto bill that we could realistically get out of Washington will substantially reduce liberty. The best that we can hope for is for Washington to forget about crypto until it is too late to stop.
This is our best hope at this point: that Washington moves on to other things as the campaign heats up and forgets about crypto. One reason Washington pushed for the Wiretap Act (aka Digital Telephony) was because digital switches have made conventional methods of wiretapping and pen registers harder and harder to do. (I'm not a phone phreaker expert, as some of you no doubt are, so I don't know the details of how wiretaps were done prior to the advent of digital switches...I picture wires connected to the back of PBX systems, and I presume the ESS systems and their ilk changed this dramatically.) However--and here's the kicker!--they blew it. If you look at Louis Freeh's testimony before Congress a couple of years ago (which I did in detail, as I scanned and OCRed it for Whit Diffie, who may make it available soon) he was clearly worried about the phone system becoming so complex and "so digital" that FBI surveillance capabilities would fall behind the technology curve. So, he and his supporters (including the EFF) pushed for the Wiretap Act. (No money has yet been allocated, last I heard, so the $500 million supposedly to reimburse the telcos for providing wiretap capability, hasn't happened.) The main way they blew it is that the Wiretap Act ostensibly does not cover end-to-end encryption, especially as computers are used in place of telephones. And as Internet voice systems become widespread, especially with transparent, easy-to-use encryption (Nautilus, PGPhone, etc., in a couple of version iterations), even some goombah in Little Sicily will be able to communicate securely and essentially unbreakably. That they are realizing this, belatedly (although hints of this recognition can be found in Freeh's comments to Congress), may be why a couple of moves are occurring: - a fast-track review by the FCC to determine if "Internet voice" services are to be regulated, controlled, enacted, redacted, and impacted. (The traditional phonecos are the ones squealing most loudly, but others are expressing concern over the "anarchy" of unlicensed Internet applications.) - the Leahy Bill, which would as various analysts have noted make disclosure of keys mandatory, would protect the legitimate needs of law enforcement, blah blah blah. Speculatively, I can see something coming on the horizon. Suppose the FCC, under the Telecommuications Act, the Leahy Act (or whatever), and the Digital Telephony Act, extended to the Internet the same general restrictions on cryptography that currently apply to the airwaves? Suppose encryption is allowed, but only with key escrow? While I can think of various problems with enforcement--the very points many of us have raised over the past several years--I can also see this as having wide support. And it might pass constitutional muster (for the same reasons the FCC jurisdiction over airwaves and the ban on encryption by ham operators, got approval. Sure, I understand that Internet bandwidth is not the same as the "public airwaves," but this subtlety may not be enough to stop the parallel from being successfully drawn. Especially if the phone companies and other threatened players are pushing hard for the FCC to step in and regulate. Food for thought. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."