Re: Cryptophone

["Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com>]

Mike Ingle says:
> Where is the cryptophone project?

There is no one such project. There are several of them that I know
of. If you think its an interesting thing to do, I strongly encourage
working on it on your own -- its not the sort of thing that requires
lots of people working on it, but it is the sort of thing that more
people talk about than do.

> I haven't seen anything about it for a while. Last I read, a company
> had a commercial triple-DES product with no public key - has anyone
> seen this? How is the sound quality? The cryptophone is the best way
> to drive a stake through the heart of Clipper.

I fully agree.

Recent developments have been interesting on other fronts. 24kbps and
28kbps modems have arrived on the market, albeit at high prices. When
the final V.Fast standard comes in, 28kbps modems should cost only a
few hundred dollars. Although ordinary workstations can't do CELP fast
enough, GSM appears to be easily workable even on "normal" computers.

> Suppose someone writes a crypto program and gives it to some friends. One of
> the friends uploads it to a BBS. Someone calls up from a foreign country and
> downloads it from the BBS. Who is at fault? The person who wrote it, for not
> retaining control over his product? The friend who uploaded it, for placing
> it where a foreigner could access it? The operator of the BBS, for not
> screening the file and preventing the foreigner from downloading it? Or the
> foreigner himself, who is probably out of range of U.S. law in any case?

There is no case law or statute on this. The folks writing the laws
didn't understand computers and had no notion of the fact that it was
possible for someone physically outside the country to access
information physically inside the country. With luck, the case will
simply be overturned, and there may never be any case law defining
this silly form of "export".

Perry