On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 11:36:56AM -0700, Tim May wrote: | On Thursday, August 30, 2001, at 11:07 AM, Adam Shostack wrote: | | > On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 10:02:54AM -0700, Tim May wrote: | > | Alas, the marketing of such "dissident-grade untraceability" is | > | difficult. Partly because anything that is dissident-grade is also | > | pedophile-grade, money launderer-grade, freedom fighter-grade, | > | terrorist-grade, etc. | > | > I think a larger problem is that we don't know how to build it. Once | > we build it, we may be able to market it. But when you look at | > building something for dissidents, you realize that you have very high | > stealth requirements, since using such software is likely to subject | > its users to rubber-hose, and harsher forms of attack. | | A quibble, but I would separate the stego aspect from the untraceability | aspect. It is true that in certain regime--China, Afghanistan, Iran, | Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.--sending and receiving encrypted packets will | be ipso facto proof of guilt or at least grounds for hauling in for | torture. Even stego in the ad banners, sound files, images, etc. will be | problematic. This is the stego, or stealth, topic we all know about. | (Aimee and Ray, cover your ears.) | | In regimes where something akin to the First Amendment provides | unassailable protection against sending and receiving bits in a form not | necessarily readable by snoops, providing untraceability is enough. Well, I'm glad you'd seperate it, but when you get down to constructing systems, you have to re-integrate it. And if you're talking about dissidents, you have to solve it really well. I wouldn't be comfortable saying "Yeah, use this and Bejing won't bother you" with anything less. Maybe you would. As far as not readable by the FBI/NSA, see the Back/Muller/Stiglic paper. As far as your opinions of our business, well, I'm really uninterested in getting into a pissing match with you. The reality is that customers and investors give us money tp produce privacy tools, and they, not you, are the ones I need to keep happy. Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume