At 9:56 PM -0800 on 12/5/00, Greg Broiles wrote:
On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 05:16:03PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
The legal fight over whether the monitor was legal and whether the information so obtained are in fact records of criminal activity is a side-show. It remains practical evidence of how insecure computer equipment / OS's and pass-phrase based identity authentication combine to reduce the effective security of a system.
I fully support this comment that the whole issue of "legality" is a "side show."
Exactly - not every attacker represents law enforcement,
Right. My own personal opinion is that the more *money* is controlled with cryptography and moved/stored on the internet, the stronger those technologies will become, and, unfortunately, not for any other reason. Like Whit Diffie has said, "cyberwar" will be "fought" by businesses, and not nation-states. Government black-bag jobs are just one of many kinds of theft... Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'