On 13 Sep 97 at 12:16, Black Unicorn wrote:
To this, all I can find of enough magnitude to put them in such state is that they just recently *truly* realized that crypto will, infinitely more than to threaten the security of the state, threaten their very existence by putting them outside of the money loop.
Strongly disagree.
In fact, the forces driving the current legislation, FBI, DoD, are more concerned not with being unable to decrypt in realtime than they are about being unable to distinquish, en masse, the bad actors encrypted communications with the paranoid but harmless crypto user. If crypto gets widespread enough there is no way to filter one from the other any longer.
Your last sentence means that they can read crypted text. They even hinted at it recently. But then, why the proposed law? Do they indulge in statistical efficiency or do they want 99.9999+% efficiency at their "filtering"? I'd say if they "filter" only, say, 90% of all communications and an Oklahoma City plan passes by in the 10% remaining, it won't be good enough for them. So, why the law if they already can decrypt? Can you reasonnably expect the vilains to use the most easy-to-crack and/or GAKed schemes?
The "private currency and taxation loss" is not even on the radar screens. Oliver Ireland, of the fed, thinks its just silly to think that way. Also see Kendall Houghton, (Committee on State Taxation) remarks on the subject. The powers that be just roll their eyes at the "no more taxes" crypto-radical crowd.
If you were in their shoes, what would you say to the public? Ever heard about the game called Poker? Did Santa told you they would never lie to you? In the last few weeks, I've been thinking about the utility and security risk of using PGP if it can be cracked easily. And then, I realized that my reaction was probably just what they expected: FUD to have people limit by themselves their use of strong crypto. Coupled with the cops saying that "of course, we can decode them, but just a tad too slow to protect your childs...", I now believe they just can't crack it. And with it, comes their crackdown on crypto users, their e-$ and their crypted love letters. jfa -- Jean-Francois Avon, Pierrefonds(Montreal) QC Canada DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee Finest of Limoges porcelain and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultants physicists and engineers, LabView programing. PGP encryption keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon http://bs.mit.edu:8001/pks-toplev.html ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891 ID# 5B51964D : 152ACCBCD4A481B0 254011193237822C