responding to claims about TCPA

[Steve Schear]

At 04:02 AM 8/10/2002 -0700, John Gilmore wrote:

>"The transaction"?  What transaction?  They were talking about the
>owner getting reliable reporting on the security of their applications
>and OS's and -- uh -- oh yeah, buying music or video over the Internet.
>
>Part of their misleading technique has apparently been to present no
>clear layman's explanations of the actual workings of the technology.
>There's a huge gap between the appealing marketing sound bites -- or
>FAQ lies -- and the deliberately dry and uneducational 400-page
>technical specs.  My own judgement is that this is probably
>deliberate, since if the public had an accurate 20-page document that
>explained how this stuff works and what it is good for, they would
>reject the tech instantly.
>
>Perhaps we in the community should write such a document.  Lucky and
>Adam Back seem to be working towards it.  The similar document about
>key-escrow (that CDT published after assembling a panel of experts
>including me, Whit, and Matt Blaze) was quite useful in explaining to
>lay people and Congressmen what was wrong with it.  NSA/DoJ had
>trouble countering it, since it was based on the published facts, and
>they couldn't impugn the credentials of the authors, nor the
>document's internal reasoning.

Indeed.  Another item I recall from Lucky's Defcon talk is that (I assume) 
Intel are back at it when it comes to obfuscated crypto.  Like the Pentium 
RNG before it, the TPCA HW will only expose a whitened version making 
independent analysis difficult-impossible.

   steve