-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 09:15 PM 7/18/97 -0700, Joe Shea wrote:
Judges -- people like the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- would look rather askance at requests for someone's key when it was no more aggravating an issue than a piece of flame mail. On the other hand, if someone's going to blow up San Francisco this week, it sure would help to have a key to any encrypted communications he was generating.
The gov't doesn't give any KE agent, judge or otherwise, permission to see the actual decrypted traffic to make sure it matches the excuse given on the request for access. The gov't can always come back and say, "Well, he didn't say anything useful so we didn't record anything -- thanks for the key anyway." If the gov't had to get content itself from a judge -- or, better, from the NYTimes, Wash Post, ACLU, etc. -- then maybe we'd be closer to a politically workable answer. That is, it would be valueless as a covert intelligence tool. - Carl -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM9EVYFQXJENzYr45AQFPrwQAlss0rHedSDH243QOsZdt0vNMAdVuD52b aYZTXlBM9or33z9Ri35wSBAy8iGdVnX6lgloUUMzO7EsHrw5ytMFyNM/Lj1mnLkp GYBBmdZYcgO1uJMOdk2GlqJ7FNVPEgPFdlxiphMFBlDYjdH1MVoTCg2s1FwhIJbs LRBSZaRODxM= =i9dR -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- +------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme@acm.org http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | | PGP: 61 E2 DE 7F CB 9D 79 84 E9 C8 04 8B A6 32 21 A2 | +-Officer, officer, arrest that man. He's whistling a dirty song.--+