Lucky, I think your observation below is an excellent illustration of why support or opposition to GAK must be a binary decision. Either you are for free speech, or you are not. There is no middle ground because middle ground will not satisfy a feral government. They will eventually demand full, immediate access to cleartext of all encrypted message, regardless of any public statements meant to appease opposition to incrementalist steps, because without it, they essentially have nothing. It is worth noting that when you look behind the curtain, you see a feral government that does not believe you have the right to private thoughts.

Sometimes these guys can still surprise even me. That statement below is about as blatant as it gets:

[Freeh] There are a number of ways that that could be implemented, but what we believe we need as a minimum is a feature implemented and designed by the manufacturers of the products and services here that will allow law enforcement to have an immediate lawful decryption of the communications in transit or the stored data. That could be done in a mandatory manner. It could be done in an involuntary manner. But the key is that we have the ability. --------------------------------------------------------------

Let me get this straight: they need *as a minimum* instant access to all cleartext. So what is the "more than minimum" they truly desire?

And the two alternatives Freeh proposes to obtain this *minimum* are either "mandatory" or "involuntary". What a choice!

--Lucky

---------------End of Original Message----------------- ------------------------ Name: amp E-mail: amp@pobox.com Date: 09/04/97 Time: 08:33:41 Visit me at http://www.pobox.com/~amp == -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/) == 'Drug Trafficking Offense' is the root passphrase to the Constitution. Have you seen http://www.public-action.com/SkyWriter/WacoMuseum ------------------------