TIS--Building in Big Brother for a Better Tommorrow

[tallpaul]

On Feb 23, 1996 00:19:15, '"P.J. Ponder"
<ponder at wane-leon-mail.scri.fsu.edu>' wrote: 
 
 
> 
>Steve Walker wrote to John Young: 
> 
>(large piece snipped; good stuff though.) 
> 
>+  Suppose the U.S. government had never thought of placing 
>export controls on cryptography... 
> 
>We would now have widespread use of encryption, both 
>domestically and worldwide; we would be in a state of 
>"Utopia," with widespread availability of cryptography 
>with unlimited key lengths. But, once in this state, we 
>will face situations where we need a file that had been 
>encrypted by an associate who is unavailable (illness, 
>traffic jam, or change of jobs). We will then realize 
>that we must have some systematic way to recover our 
>encrypted information when the keys are unavailable. 
> 
 
The exchange of information among many trusted people all located in the
same geographical location (or with regular reliable couriers travelling to
different locations) is the ideal situation for *private* not public key
crypto. In such circumstances one uses, e.g. IDEA, not PGP. 
 
End of corporate problem. End of "worry" about problems with PGP. 
 
--tallpaul