-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Mike Godwin asks whether one of Clipper's attractive points (well, not to us, anyway) is the increased ability of LE to do traffic analysis.
The reason I ask is, I have this sense that one reason the government likes Clipper is that the Law Enforcement Access Field enables agents to draw inferences about who's talking to whom and what they're saying, even without decrypting the actual communications.
Of course! Let's say that you call someone who's under Clipper surveillance. Of course, you use your Clipperphone(*). The feds can now go to a judge and say "Well, we know the holder of this key ID called the suspect we have under surveillance... we want to surveil _his_ line too." Guilt by association. The agents should ideally have lawful authorization to be monitoring the line, but think how easy it would be to do full-time, real-time traffic analysis based on LEAF information. - -Paul (*) Not meant to imply that Mike would be likely to use a Clipperphone. - -- Paul Robichaux, KD4JZG | PGP key via finger & keyservers. perobich@ingr.com | Be a cryptography user- ask me how. Intergraph Federal Systems | Of course I don't speak for Intergraph. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLWD0FiA78To+806NAQF8KgP+PNlaWhQeBKXZuMLnvAqX0PaPwpnY+R6g 3g1snyCjLNxOGYlCOO0y/NczPsSxyp0yMMvod/XWrVCZutx/aKaepzq6AXA4o8qh e0OnpgEKwkyfK49qTx5As7ajdRcDMIGSmiUvrKKodEZZhSB2+V3hKfN8Hdgq0A6b aDIUhxHPXFs= =1qsj -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----