CDR: Re: Zero Knowledge changes business model (press release)

[Adam Shostack]

On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 07:08:06PM -0500, Tim May wrote:
| 
| At 5:59 PM -0500 11/1/00, Adam Shostack wrote:
| >
| >As to the hypothetical that Tim will ask, we'll work very hard to
| >prevent laws requiring key escrow from coming into being.  We spend
| >time and energy maintaining relations with law enforcement in a lot of
| >places, explaining to them why we don't build in back doors.  And,
| >suprisingly, when you go and talk to them, rather than hissing and
| >shouting, they listen.
| 
| By the way, I've been curious about this "we spend time and energy 
| maintaining relations with law enforcement" point for a while. In 
| numerous comments I've seen this mentioned.
| 
| Why do you spend any of your valuable time talking to law enforcement/

	Because if we don't, then they get confused about what we're
trying to accomplish, they forget that privacy has lots of valuable
uses which are not the collapse of governments and tax revenue, and
try to ban what we're doing.  And then they go talk to Parliment to
get laws passed.  We see that as a bad thing.  Having spent time on
these conversations, I see it paying off.  And no, its not paying off
because we've added any backdoors.  I think we can agree to disagree
on this one, Tim.

| ZKS may have aspects of Wei Dai's PipeNet technology (though Wei Dai 
| remains critical of what he has seen of Freedom, last I heard), but 
| this additional layer of traffic analysis security is all for naught 
| if the _interesting_ uses of Freedom are not possible.

Enough of our source is out there.  (The kernel bits of the AIP went
out a few days ago.  You can wait on the userland chunks, or write
your own.)  So, you don't like some aspects of what we've done,
replace those parts.

Feel free, if you know what the market wants.  I'm curious 
if you'll be running a node yourself?

| By the way, the only plausible argument for having extensive traffic 
| padding measures, a la PipeNet, is to defeat the sniffers and such 
| typically employed via "national technical means," i.e., NSA, GCHQ, 
| SDECE, etc. An ordinary little girl using Freedom, the putative 
| target candidate for Freedom, say the ads, is not going to need 
| PipeNet-style traffic padding!!!

	Actually, I'm unconvinced that even pipenet style padding is
sufficient.  Looking at the work on traffic analysis thats been done,
we're in about 1970.  We have one time pads (dc-nets), and some other
stuff, but we don't have a DES to analyze.  We have an adversary who
has spent a long time learning how to do this well.

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume