Where is the cryptophone project? I haven't seen anything about it for a while. Last I read, a company had a commercial triple-DES product with no public key - has anyone seen this? How is the sound quality? The cryptophone is the best way to drive a stake through the heart of Clipper. Suppose someone writes a crypto program and gives it to some friends. One of the friends uploads it to a BBS. Someone calls up from a foreign country and downloads it from the BBS. Who is at fault? The person who wrote it, for not retaining control over his product? The friend who uploaded it, for placing it where a foreigner could access it? The operator of the BBS, for not screening the file and preventing the foreigner from downloading it? Or the foreigner himself, who is probably out of range of U.S. law in any case? Suppose someone writes a crypto program and makes it generally available to anyone who wants it. It goes out of the country, but there is no way to know who sent it out of the country or how. Can they prosecute the person who wrote it for not maintaining control over it? If they can, this means, among other things, that selling the Norton Utilities to someone without checking to see that they are a citizen is illegal, and that having PKZIP on your BBS is illegal. If the precedent gets established that the person who writes such a program is responsible for keeping it out of the hands of foreigners, that would be a big problem. All crypto would have to be published anonymously, because nobody could risk signing their name to it. This must not happen! The flamewar going on here is counterproductive; they must be laughing down at the fort. --- MikeIngle@delphi.com
Mike Ingle says:
Where is the cryptophone project?
There is no one such project. There are several of them that I know of. If you think its an interesting thing to do, I strongly encourage working on it on your own -- its not the sort of thing that requires lots of people working on it, but it is the sort of thing that more people talk about than do.
I haven't seen anything about it for a while. Last I read, a company had a commercial triple-DES product with no public key - has anyone seen this? How is the sound quality? The cryptophone is the best way to drive a stake through the heart of Clipper.
I fully agree. Recent developments have been interesting on other fronts. 24kbps and 28kbps modems have arrived on the market, albeit at high prices. When the final V.Fast standard comes in, 28kbps modems should cost only a few hundred dollars. Although ordinary workstations can't do CELP fast enough, GSM appears to be easily workable even on "normal" computers.
Suppose someone writes a crypto program and gives it to some friends. One of the friends uploads it to a BBS. Someone calls up from a foreign country and downloads it from the BBS. Who is at fault? The person who wrote it, for not retaining control over his product? The friend who uploaded it, for placing it where a foreigner could access it? The operator of the BBS, for not screening the file and preventing the foreigner from downloading it? Or the foreigner himself, who is probably out of range of U.S. law in any case?
There is no case law or statute on this. The folks writing the laws didn't understand computers and had no notion of the fact that it was possible for someone physically outside the country to access information physically inside the country. With luck, the case will simply be overturned, and there may never be any case law defining this silly form of "export". Perry
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Mike Ingle -
Perry E. Metzger