On Sat, 24 Mar 2012 02:29:30 -0500
Marsh Ray
If you're looking for someplace to feel subversive around, this isn't it. Crypto is a mainstream engineering discipline these days, and one greatly needed by modern civilization.
Unfortunately, there is still a great deal of resistance to the notion that cryptography is something that people should have, at least cryptography without backdoors. When last I checked, the Department of Justice was still pushing communication service providers to include some sort of back door, so that law enforcement agencies can decrypt the encrypted communications of suspects in criminal cases. They basically think that the Hushmail model is the right one: http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/hear_02172011.html (Apologies for the length; the summary is this: the FBI is worried about criminals or terrorists using encryption to hide their communications from law enforcement and national security agencies, as well as the lack of CALEA-style systems on the Internet. They as asking for a law that requires communications service providers to provide plaintexts if it is possible to do so e.g. Hushmail-style decryption. The FBI insists that they are not talking about key escrow or key recovery, and they avoid using the term "back door" to describe what they want.) Even worse, here at UVA we had a graduate student who was denied entry because he traveled to a cryptography conference (he is here on a student visa, and is a Chinese citizen). The State Department would not allow him to come back to school unless he switched fields and stopped doing computer security work. He is working on wireless sensor networks now -- clearly a field that could not possibly have any national security implications. The law has definitely improved over what cryptographers faced in the 90s, but the attitudes have not. The US government still wants a system where encrypted communications can be arbitrarily decrypted, they just dress up the argument and avoid using dirty words like "key escrow." -- Ben -- Benjamin R Kreuter UVA Computer Science brk7bx@virginia.edu KK4FJZ -- "If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them." - George Orwell _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE