Dave Sobel has been wondering just how the Escrow Agency will check up on the requests for keys that it gets from the NSA. The procedures aren't decided yet, but from my understanding of the presentation given at the last CSSAB meeting in Washington, the Escrow agencies won't have a person/phone to escrow id number mapping that would allow them to check if a request for a key is valid. There are two reasons for this. 1) It would be pretty useless because people could sell their phones at garage sales or give them as Christmas gifts and screw up the list. 2) This is also a "feature". If two of the escrow agents (from different agencies) decided to go bad, then they wouldn't be able to look up their enemy Bob's escrow key by name. They would need some of the real-time hardware and access to the family key. Presumably, this would be handled by a third party. -Peter
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Peter Wayner