
A supplement to the NYC Crypto Forum: Toward the end Nesson asked, "How about the missing participant here, NSA?" Several panelists noted, "NSA's here, in the audience." (Nonesuch spoke, however.) Nesson went on to ask, "What about national security interests outweighing the right to privacy?" It was here that David Kahn offered his defense of key recovery. Farber and others responded that the problem is that the government is not trusted, that guards against abuse of power have not worked, that national security too often has been a cloak for illicit actions. Here, an audience member said that he worked at Salomon Brothers doing traffic analysis of vast E-mail, and that we should be aware that more electronic snooping is going on than most people know. How could we be sure that law enforcement would not similarly abuse systems set up to catch criminals for other purposes, as NSA allegedly does, and, now using the same methodolgies, as private companies do to spy on employees, customers and competitors. All panelists nodded at this, that it's hard to tell god from the devil, and crypto won't help.