On Fri, 14 Jul 1995, Carl Ellison wrote: ...

Meanwhile, the Federal civil forfeiture fund goes to good things. The last $9M (I believe it was) went to buying up AT&T DES phones to be made into Clipper phones. Of course, the conversion hasn't happened yet and the DES phones are sitting in a warehouse someplace -- but the $9M fund went to ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Nope. There is one right here in my office. And it makes me feel so safe and secure.

Seriously, I have used it in secure mode once -- to test it. I'd be more likely to use my STU-III if I really want to be secure.

really good use, saving the world from AT&T DES.

(sarcasm off)

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme@acm.org http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/home.html | |PGP: E0414C79B5AF36750217BC1A57386478 & 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 | | ``Officer, officer, arrest that man! He's whistling a dirty song.'' | +----------------------------------------------------------- Jean Ellison -+

EBD

Date: Fri, 14 Jul 95 19:11:39 EDT From: Carl Ellison <cme@tis.com> Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Precedence: bulk [I've combined parts of Carl's two recent messages...] I believe that the concern about defining predicate acts this way comes from the RICO requirement that there be TWO instances of a crime in order to pass the test of perpetrating a *pattern of crime* and therefore be ranked as a mobster subject to RICO. My guess is that the intent is that from one placement on an FTP server or one posting to a newsgroup, the perpetrator of that heinous act will have passed his RICO qualification and therefore be subject to having all he owns taken from him. I agree with Carl here. The crypto section has no GAK exclusion. It makes it as illegal to release GAKed crypto on a net as PGP. The proposed 1030A(c) provides a defense to prosecution under 1030A(a). So if GAKed crypto satisfies 1030A(c) then it can be deployed without fear of prosecution under 1030A(a). It might still violate ITAR, of course, although I suspect any system that satisfies 1030A(c) would be granted a CJ.

`(c) It shall be an affirmative defense to prosecution under this section that the software at issue used a universal decoding device or program that was provided to the Department of Justice prior to the distribution.'.

This isn't escrowed encryption being allowed here. This is straight giving of keys (or a back door) to the gov't. Even Clipper fails this test. Why doesn't GAK satisfy this clause? Clearly if the keys are escrowed with two Dept. of Justice entities (or if there's only one escrow agent and it's a DOJ entity) then DOJ will have been provided with sufficient information to decode any encryted information by themselves. Certainly commercial escrow systems (such as TIS's CKE[*] system with DRCs (data recovery centers) and DRFs (data recovery fields)) could fail this test, since the chosen escrow agents may not be subject to DOJ control. But I could build a CKE system with an "overriding UI (user identifier)" that had access to all the keys, and provide that UI to DOJ. The "universal decoding device" would then be to go to the DRC, present that UI and the DRF and recover the desired information. I don't see how Clipper fails the 1030A(c) test, except possibly for the fact that the proposed escrow agents were not both within DOJ. I think that's a minor point. --bal [*] See ftp://ftp.tis.com/pub/crypto/drc/papers/drc.ps, Carl's initial description of the TIS CKE system.