Date: Wed, 18 Jan 1995 19:38:54 -0800 From: eric@remailer.net (Eric Hughes)

From: "Dr. D.C. Williams" <dcwill@ee.unr.edu>

Safe deposit boxes, by virtue of their accessibility to law enforcement, are subject to search and seizure under court order and are sealed in certain cases (probate). This makes them likely to be the first place to look when the Feds decide that we can't have keys anymore.

I am not designing systems for the paranoid fantasy of an inspection of all safety deposit boxes by government agents in search of contraband.

I am interested in designing systems which will fit into business as usual, that are inconspicuous by their prevalance, and which will be a part of ordinary and usual protection of data by cryptographic means.

On the less paranoid side of this, you might check out TIS's Data Recovery Center plans. ftp://ftp.tis.com/pub/crypto/drc/ and below. That location will have some code for interfacing to the prototype DRC in a week or two. Send me e-mail if you want to be on the mailing list for notification of code availability/updates. On the more paranoid side of this, in spite of Steve Walker's relish over the fact that TIS's CKE (Commercial Key Escrow -- his name for the DRC work) keeps keys out of government hands, except in cases of actual search warrant, it looks (according to one privacy-advocate lawyer I discussed this with) as if access can be gained with a mere subpoena -- and, according to Scott Charney (of Justice Dept., if I remember correctly) the currnet view is that if you voluntarily give a copy of your key to your employer, you've abandoned your presumption of privacy and that relieves the gov't of getting a search warrant (and maybe even subpoenna). - Carl