If we had key escrow, Scarfo wouldn't be a problem

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, August 14, 2001, at 03:03 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> The Washington Post finally catches on to the fact that the Scarfo case 
> exists, a few weeks after everyone else wrote about the hearing in 
> Newark. The front-page story today by Jonathan Krim contains this 
> memorable passage:
>
> http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55606-2001Aug9.html
> "Encryption is virtually unbreakable by police today, with programs 
> that can be bought for $15," said Stewart Baker, former general counsel 
> of the National Security Agency and now partner at the Washington law 
> firm Steptoe & Johnson. Although agreeing that surveillance should be 
> done under strict guidelines, Baker said that "to a degree, the privacy 
> groups got us into this by arguing that there should be no limits on 
> encryption, and the police have to deal with it."
>


Not that anyone had any doubts about the ultimate intentions of the "key 
escrow" people, but it's useful to remember what the _ostensible_ goals 
were, and then compare it with what Stewart Baker is saying above.

Item: the "key escrow" controversy arose with Clipper, the _telephone_ 
system to be sold by AT&T containing the Clipper chip made by Mykotronx.

Item: anyone think Scafo or his pals would have bought such a 
Clipperphone?

Item: even a few years later, when the key escrow issue surfaced with 
_software_, there was no plausible way that the horses already out of 
the barn (*) could have been herded back into the barn and made to 
incorporate Skipjack or any other "key escrow" features.

(* The horses being: a vast number of already-deployed laptops, PCs, 
modems, cellphones, cable modems, satellite phones, PDAs, etc. What was 
the government to do, tell people to turn in their laptops? Banning 
crypto use, and enforcing such a ban in the face of millions of users of 
unskipjacked machines, would be very difficult. Stego would make it even 
harder to detect and enforce.)

Item: the key escrow thing never got out of the NSA dreaming stages. No 
legislation was ever introduced (nothing serious, at least...one can 
never count out bizarre fliers). The massive logistical and technical 
and _CONSTITUTIONAL_ issues were the reason a key escrow law never got 
proposed.

The "privacy groups" pointed out that the Emperor has no clothes, but a 
real proposed law never would've gotten anywhere. Only a police state 
could "ban" unescrowed crypto. Only places like Russia, South Africa, 
and Britain. (And they will find enforcement and what it does to their 
communications infrastructures to be daunting problems.)

--Tim May