Re: Communications Policy

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Norm Hardy raises an important issue:

> I hear concern over privacy and also over erasure of White House tapes.
> I pose the following question: Should an institution have the right
> to private communication? Is the White House an institution?
> Notice that I say "should" not "does".
> Which sort of world would you rather live in. I have mixed feelings.
> If we say that all computer communications should be accessible to courts
> then the effect will be to displace some communications from computers.

Individuals, corporations, clubs, and perhaps even government agencies
should have the right to secure and private communications. The only
caveat with the "perhaps" for the government is that it, in theory,
belongs to "us."

I find it unsettling when people of one political party are screaming
for access to the private diaries and papers of members of the other
party. Citing Ollie North's crimes is no excuse.

If e-mail records are automatically seized and subject to archiving
and dissection, then e-mail just won't be used. Historians are already
becoming apoplectic at the vanishing of written records, letters,
notes, and the like...this may reduce even electronic records.

Strong crypto means even Ollie North can fully protect his records.
(Of course, he presumably already had access to reasonably strong
crypto, had he chosen to use it. And his e-mail was uncovered through
the very common method of finding the archived copies of IBM's "PROFS"
e-mail system kept by sysadmins. Sort of like the archives being kept
by some of the so-called anonymous remailers!)

-Tim May




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