From - Wed Sep 10 09:42:25 1997 Path: news.mitre.org!news From: Glenn Everhart Newsgroups: alt.security.pgp,comp.security.pgp.discuss,talk.politics.crypto Subject: Re: Sounds of Silence Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 09:16:08 -0400 Organization: Speaking for myself... Lines: 45 Message-ID: <34169D98.6867@gce.com> References: <5ur8mh$pu5$1@news.us.net> <3412E962.19958ACC@sternlight.com> <5v635g$r3h@camel1.mindspring.com> Reply-To: Everhart@Arisia.GCE.Com NNTP-Posting-Host: geverhart-pc.mitre.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (Win95; U) Xref: news.mitre.org alt.security.pgp:80685 comp.security.pgp.discuss:7171 talk.politics.crypto:25211 Isaac wrote: > > In article , David Lesher wrote: > >........ > > So I want to say one more time that we're not asking > >for any new powers or new authorities. We're asking for a > >Fourth Amendment that works in the information age. > >......... > > I find this attitude appalling. I'm sure when Freeh rehearsed this, it > sounded clever, but only a fool would advocate tampering with the > constitution rather than claiming that his policy was already > constitutional. > > Leave the bill of rights alone dude. > > Isaac Cryptography amounts to deciding with someone(s) else what words and/or alphabet you will use in communicating. Govt control of this seems to my mind a flagrant violation of the Constitution (specifically amendment 1), thus advocating same would appear to be a violation of the oath of office of any federal person (which includes a promise to uphold the Constitution). that aside though, this drilling of backdoors in transactions makes them grossly vulnerable, making both govt (they're moving in the direction of commercial stuff) and commercial systems' transactions more likely to be compromised. Aside from alleged improprieties within govt' for political gain, have the FBI and other folks so quickly forgotten the many spy incidents over the years? The attractiveness of a key escrow site would be vastly greater than what we've seen before and could literally bring huge sections of the economy down if compromised. What's the pay of the clerks in such sites? How well would the computers be? (Recall how many .mil and .gov sites have been broken into and the DoD report about a large fraction of its sites being vulnerable?) Preventing strong crypto won't primarily make it easy to catch criminals. It will make it far more profitable to BE a criminal... and make everyone else far less safe, as well as less free. ---personal opinion only, this, but everyone is free to use it.