Tracking Contacts with Clipper
A comment in sci.crypt about how Clipper will make it much easier for the Feds to track who's talking to whom... This is an important point, which I've seen mentioned a few times over the past 10 months, but not given nearly enough attention. To wit, if Clipjack phones are ever used by dissidents, subversives, Cypherpunks, etc., then the key block that goes out with every call--from both ends of course--will make recording the identities of both parties trivial. The "webs of trust" of PGP get replaced by "webs of co-conspirators." An easy way to track down associates. Further, merely using an encrypted phone with a "racketeer-influenced" person could conceivably enmesh one in the conspiracy. (This is merely speculation.) Whatever happened to the "phone remailer" project? The idea, floated about 15 months ago by parties who can speak up should they wish to (I only contributed some ideas, but was not the originator), was to create commercial phone banks that would scramble the origin and destination of call. Somewhat like call forwarding schemes (which wreak havoc with some wiretap procedures) and like the old stand-by of renting a room and having one phone wired to another phone. The idea here was to put these capabilities into a central switch and sell access, various optional services, etc. Out of the country would be even better. (Did you know that some of those ee-vil 900 phone sex outfits have moved to non-U.S. locations? Seems that U.S. law about blocking access, not to mention, antipornography laws, doesn't apply in places like Tijuana.) I could see some tie-ins with Voice PGP (the Soundblaster-based projects supposedly being worked on by several different groups). --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power:2**859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
C'punks, Tim asked about "phone remailers" in one of his recent posts. Until that happens, remember that the anonymous phone cards offered by AT&T and Western Union (and others) are almost as good. This is especially true if you "chain" call through two or more different phone cards. (Expensive, though.) S a n d y
participants (2)
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Sandy Sandfort -
tcmay@netcom.com