Clipper Cracks Appear
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Seeing as it is politics week here at cpunks, I have found some interesting comments from our friends at whitehouse.gov. Commentary by John Carey in BusinessWeek Magazine (Big Brother Could Hobble High Tech, 3/24/94 pg. 37) states that: So why is the Whitehouse pushing the retrograde notions? One reason is the Clintonites fear of appearing soft on crime and terrorism. "No one wants the head of the FBI walking around saying: 'I don't have the tools to do my job'" says Bellsouth's Markey. Things aren't entirely bleak. The administration, taken aback by vehement opposition from industry, congress and civil libertarians, is suggesting it may back off. "People are willing to work things out" says White House Staff secretary John D. Podesta, who is involved in technology issues. FBI director Freeh says he's willing to accept higher hurdles to get court appointed surveilence. And there are tantalizing hints that the white house is reconsidering its hard line on the clipper chip. <end> Seems that we are having an effect and cracks are starting to leak compromise from the Gov't. This is, however, just the beginning. A ploy used successfully by many groups (New York city's transit authority are masters at this) is to put forth an outrageous proposal, such as clipper etc. Then they soften the demands so that the opponent becomes disarmed, allowing that which the Gov't had intended to pass all along to go through as a compromise. This cannot be allowed. Time to step up the attack a notch. Write the whitehouse and ask them if they want to go down in history as the presidency that ushered in the era of Big Brother. I know Bill won't read it but someone has to. Keep on your congresscritters (I like that word) and put stuff in your local paper. Arm the populace. Lastly, I think many of you are giving this countries people less credit than they deserve. Many simple men and women founded this country. Try not to be so pompous. Scott G. Morham !The First, Vaccinia@uncvx1.oit.unc.edu ! Second PGP Public Keys by Request ! and Third Levels ! of Information Storage and Retrieval !DNA, ! Biological Neural Nets, ! Cyberspace -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLYJyUz2paOMjHHAhAQEbCgP/XobypXWta9OBbOAXePNWY7zznS6HHnxS 4fb7MWKlSjRxe283D2oWV0PnNttMLfAcEOknWT8l9/Z8Ef/RUNMo2vRENToE65If oVoUh/lne+PgVpiyT8+oXc8QSFe+8qWJBNL6L1T5YMpghDYYX7bpCn07dCsUQSIb gFItcKbPp8o= =4HsY -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
I agree with Scott Morham, esp where he says:
A ploy used successfully by many groups is to put forth an outrageous proposal, such as clipper etc. Then they soften the demands so that the opponent becomes disarmed, allowing that which the Gov't had intended to pass all along to go through as a compromise.
My fear for a while has been that key escrow is this "outrageous proposal" -- that is, the gov't doesn't really think it can make key escrow acceptable, so it'll propose a "compromise" of using Clipper without the key escrow. The logic behind this is that the LEAF field is not encrypted very strongly; this would allow the NSA/FBI to decrypt a conversation without having to bother with the keys (at least as I understand it; I'd be happy to be told I was wrong). According to notes published on this list, the NSA has already admitted that the LEAF is not itself encrypted with Clipper; we don't know what it is encrypted with, but I wonder: Assume that the LEAF is weakly encrypted. Assume that third parties (such as cypherpunks) try to show this by decrypting the LEAF. Would we be able to *recognize* a decrypted LEAF? Not knowing the SKIPJACK algorithm, it's unclear to me that we could recognize a session key even if we had one! This sort of "security through obscurity" seems to be useful, as it renders the LEAF immune to "known plaintext" forms of attack. Again, I repeat that my knowledge of crypto is rudimentary at best, so it's possible I'm wrong about some or all of this... --Alan Wexelblat, Reality Hacker, Author, and Cyberspace Bard Media Lab - Advanced Human Interface Group wex@media.mit.edu Voice: 617-258-9168 Page: 617-945-1842 na53607@anon.penet.fi We are Chaos Boys. We are coming to a paradigm near you.
participants (2)
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Alan (Miburi-san) Wexelblat -
VACCINIA＠UNCVX1.OIT.UNC.EDU