Crispin and Hettinga discussing efficient markets for key bailment:

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In a geodesic network, a single node can not possibly process all the information in the network. It chokes, and the network routes around it. You can bet that any key escrow agent would be innundated with surveillance requests

We're not talking about a lot of bits, here. If you take care of the hard problem, which is getting people to hand their keys over to easily located key baliffs for no good business reason, the amount of retrieval work is really a lot smaller than the work of wiretapping all the communications and selecting targets. If the government expects to get the key owners to pay for bailment, and get retrievals for free in return for paper copies of warrants blue-ink-signed by judges, in triplicate, with hand-pressed notary seals, yes, that'd be a bottleneck. On the other hand, if the key bailiffs accept electronic requests, digitally signed by the judge's key, with electronic payment attached (whether DigiCash or EscrowBucks), the costs of the key bailment service are quite low and the profit on each request makes it worthwhile to expand the business to meet rapidly-increasing demand - cheap enough to the government to make it worth wiretapping more encrypted transactions. Since the Secretary gets to approve Key Recovery Agent Parties, he can disavow all knowledge of agents who insist on a real signature and want to be sure the request was signed by a real judge rather than by some clerk or cop using the Escrowed copy of the judge's key. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)