On 10 Sep 1998 17:51:31 -0500, Greg Broiles wrote:

If you want to know what crypto regs and net use regs are going to look like in 10-20 years, look at the amateur radio regs now - we'll have citizens' committees (similar to the "block leaders" on GeoCities) who stay up late at night, unpaid, watching their fellow subjects for signs of pseudonym use, or the use of unlicensed/unapproved crypto, or "unlicensed Internet broadcasting".

Are we already seing this, with CAUCE and USENET II? Good users are known users (... and if it stops just one spammer...) -- Phelix

Hey, guys, Someone here already said it, but nobody else got it, so I'll repeat it: SSB, or Single Sideband. It's commercial ham radio, if you will, and all the ships use it. I expect that you can shove anything down an SSB set that you want, including encrypted traffic. Ham radio is a government nerd subsidy, and as such, doesn't do much but make more government funded/sactioned/approved/whatever nerds. :-). SSB would do just fine. It's an international standard, after all, and probably not under the control of any one government, even.e Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism http://www.philodox.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

At 07:57 AM 9/9/98 -0700, Brian W. Buchanan wrote:

On Wed, 9 Sep 1998, Jim Choate wrote:

...

The FCC prohibits the transmission of encrypted data via analog or digital signals by amateurs.

I'd love to see them try to enforce that. What about chaffing and winnowing? Stego? Transmission of random noise? ;) Anyone have the text of the actual rules concerning this?

I don't know of a persistent web copy of the regs (only query-based ones, where the queries are only good for a few hours), but the regulation you're looking for is 47 CFR 97.113 - "(a) No amateur station shall transmit: . . . . (4) Music using a phone emission except as specifically provided elsewhere in this section; communications intended to facilitate a criminal act; messages in codes or ciphers intended to obscure the meaning thereof, except as otherwise provided herein; obscene or indecent words or language; or false or deceptive messages, signals, or identification" As I understand things (and I don't follow communications law, so I don't think my opinion is well-informed), the restrictions only apply to transmissions within the amateur band(s); so that's not applicable to, say, the FRS (family radio service, a band recently opened to non-licensed communications - used, for example, by the small Motorola TalkAbout radios), or cordless/cellphone frequencies. PDF copies of the FCC regs are online at http://www.fcc.gov/wtb/rules.html; amateur ("ham") radio is at Part 97. I'm working on a bigger rant about crypto and radio and guns and Y2K and the net; the gist of it is that amateur radio people, who are generally decent folks as individuals, have cozied up to the FCC to protect their "radio privileges" and have been rewarded with a mountain of bureacratic horseshit which outdoes even the idiotic regulations re crypto export and firearms .. and it's enforceable because the people who got licenses from the government to communicate with each other (but only in certain ways, on certain frequencies, after identifying themselves) fall over themselves to find people who *don't* think they need a license to communicate (or who think that the First Amendment *is* their license), and they rat those non-licensed folks out to the FCC. The FCC's got an army of unpaid volunteer informers who watch their fellow subjects to ensure compliance with these silly rules .. which leads to a situation where ham radios are mostly useful for talking to other people about how the weather is in some other part of the globe, and what kind of radio someone's got, and how big their antenna is. The FCC (and parallel organizations in other countries) are discussing liberalizing the regulations regarding amateur radio use, and a significant fraction of the current radio people are opposed to the liberalization, because it'll topple their little kingdoms and make their hard-earned licenses and certifications uninteresting. If you want to know what crypto regs and net use regs are going to look like in 10-20 years, look at the amateur radio regs now - we'll have citizens' committees (similar to the "block leaders" on GeoCities) who stay up late at night, unpaid, watching their fellow subjects for signs of pseudonym use, or the use of unlicensed/unapproved crypto, or "unlicensed Internet broadcasting". The citizens' committees will explain that they're dedicated volunteers devoted to keeping their communities "clean" and "orderly", and that without their intervention the FIC would be unable to ride herd on all of the wild people using programs nobody's inspected and communicating with ciphers nobody can read, saying things that just shouldn't be said because they'll make somebody upset or something. Besides, children might be reading. Everyone wants to be polite, don't they? -- Greg Broiles        |History teaches that 'Trust us' gbroiles@netbox.com |is no guarantee of due process. |_Kasler v. Lundgren_, 98 CDOS 1581 |(March 4, 1998)