On Sun, 24 Jul 1994 wcs@anchor.ho.att.com wrote:
I have to agree, and I distinguish between "real crimes" vs. "laws". a) Untraceable payments for physical violent crimes (e.g. kidnap ransom) A leo solicits a payment for the murder of someone and busts you. The murderer is caught and testifies. This is the standard way murders are solved. Name a case where a wiretap has done it. I dare you.
b) Better communications for conspiring to do violence (murder contracts...) So talk to people and narc on them.
c) Bank Robbery (any respectable digibank can protect itself technically, but we're already seeing Teller Machine card forging in Britain, and other banks will probably have weaknesses as we learn digibanking.) Ahm, all the more reason for people to use strong crypto. You don't protect yourself by not having a gun, but by having a biger one that the rober.
d) Forgery - digital signatures are great, if they're long enough, but protecting your keys is more critical than it used to be. True, again see c)
e) Fraud - you'll probably have to do a better job checking reputations for a digital stockbroker living behind anonymous remailers paid with digicash than you currently do for physically traceable brokers like Ivan Boesky. True.
f) Extortion - it's hard to break somebody's legs in cyberspace, but you can send the threat that way, and tell where to send the money; you can also threaten to publish their private key which you stole. At which point they sign a retraction of their private key.
The 4th amendment's terms aren't for you - they're for the government to obey. While I suspect the authors of the amendment assumed the government would seize criminals and search for them, they don't claim that power as their right, they only place limits on it. Amen. I think we need to throw out the concept of fruits of a poisioned tree and start puting criminals that break the 4th amendment in prision. (ok, flame me.)
Berzerk.