At 12:54 AM 8/28/97 -0400, David Jablon wrote:
James,
You're rebuttal to Myron's message is simplistically elegant, but just as wrong as the original posting.
...
On 8/27/97, James A. Donald replied paraphrasing Ben Franklin, (who really knew very little about cryptography):
What one man knows, nobody knows. What two men know, everyone knows. Shared secrets just don't work.
Perhaps a more accurate, though less clean statement would be. What YOU ALONE knows, nobody knows. What YOU and ONE other person, EVERYONE MIGHT know. Each additional person who is in on the secret opens up the possibility of leaks. Although I deleted it for space, you mentioned Doctors. A lot of people are afraid to tell thier doctors everything that the doctors need to know to do thier jobs because the patients are afraid that, as illegal as it may be, the patients medical history may end up in the hands of insurers, employers, prospective employers, and numerous other people who may want it but shouldn't have it. My dad was at a seminar where a new Scholastic Aptitude test was being introduced. He or someone asked if this information was going to be used to rate the schools. He was assured that no, it wasn't for that. A few years later, Oklahoma schools were being rated on the average score on that test, after eliminating those in chapter 1 programs. My dad's beef was that the smaller schools couldn't afford to maintain some of those programs and would thus, on average, score lower than they should. The example of a secret getting out, however, is clear. The "secret" was given to the wrong sub-department, and not by the schools.