-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Sat, 27 Jul 1996, Erle Greer wrote:
Here's how I understand it: The U.S. Government, concerned only with making America a safer place for us taxpayers to live in, wants to regulate domestic encryption in order to have access to the content of all transmissions. Their theory is that any cryptosystem that is stronger than their cryptanalysis systems can be used in illegal transmissions and should be considered munitions. Theoretically, the government should only be have the resources to control commercially-available, public encryption systems. Who is to stop anyone from designing their own cryptosystem for personal use? If the government intercepted a transmission from this private cryptosystem, and could not decrypt it, would they assume that it must be considered munitions? Similarly, anyone could send uniformly-formatted random garble that could also be considered munitions, or at least waste the governments processing time. Why are we so worried about government regulation? Can't we just devise our own cryptosystems and just don't sell them or make them publicly available?
If encryption is regulated and outlawed, then Joe Sixpack won't have access to any none Government Approved encryption algorithms. I may still have access to strong crypto, but if it isn't widespread, I won't be able to use it very effectively. As to your question about whether random data would be outlawed, it certainly wouldn't surprise me. Of course, one could always apply for permission to transmit random data that is not used to transmit encrypted information from the government. - -- Mark PGP encrypted mail prefered Key fingerprint = d61734f2800486ae6f79bfeb70f95348 http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMfq1BbZc+sv5siulAQE8pQP/YtLpV65vtOEDhCO7DcEiOqiNEc6Y/xy8 gyN80IOH+lpKX72nZF8bK+iQUj0ho4MtyPIFEoCorO72FP0gyMDPBMgi7aBcvchS p25TNlUsTMvCxbbrPuZ7plZNMEfrZz7vqUpOd2IbFd5mIBg0lRqWtegLeIOGV410 uguC7XNsl6I= =P0ky -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----