Espionage Enabling in Action, or "How much is that escrow key in the window?" We all know how cheaply spies sell out. The Falcon and the Snowman got a few tens of thousands for years of crypto keys and satelite data. Pollard got 50,000 for cubic yards of documents on all sorts of subject. The Walkers gave the Soviets a volume purchase discount, and Ames got 2 million for running the CIA's counter-espionage program on behalf of the KGB. This little key to handle 24 bits of data is nothing. It can easily be smuggled out on a floppy, in an encrypted email message, or even printed out and sent through the mail. Assuming many federal employees will all have access to the same key, its not much of a secret. So, lets buy the espionage enabling secret key. Its an obvious target, not just for cypherpunks, but for the KGB, Mossad, Toshiba, IBM, and anyone else who wants to read their competitors correspondance. Lets face it, this key will get out there, and be available to all the big players; lets make it available to everyone! This is a job for ... Blacknet! This is exactly the kind of information thats easy to resell. Its small; no smuggling DATs full of B2 bomber plans out, just a small file on a floppy disk. Its easily checked, if the Lotus message formats are public, slightly less so if they're not. Who would buy? Pick an intelligence agency. Pick any large company whose compitition uses Notes. Heck, I'd bet there are US government agencies (FBI, BATF, LAPD) who would buy it once we made it available. Its a near perfect demonstration of the foolishness of the government's position. Once this key, like the clipper keys, becomes easily available, the foolishness of the idea of GAK becomes magnified. Its ANOTHER government program that can't be run properly, thats opposed by 80% of Americans, and that doesn't even sell overseas. The persons responsible might even get to claim to be whistleblowers, demonstrating how easy it is to subvert this foolish plan that will continue to cost American business 60 billion a year in lost sales overseas. So...Is Notes V4 shipping yet? Do we know how many bits of key we're after? (NB: I'm assuming that (some part of) the US government has an RSA private key which is used to encrypt the 24 bits of GAK'd key.) Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume