Tracking Contacts with Clipper

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

A comment in sci.crypt about how Clipper will make it much easier for
the Feds to track who's talking to whom...

This is an important point, which I've seen mentioned a few times over
the past 10 months, but not given nearly enough attention. To wit, if
Clipjack phones are ever used by dissidents, subversives, Cypherpunks,
etc., then the key block that goes out with every call--from both ends
of course--will make recording the identities of both parties trivial.

The "webs of trust" of PGP get replaced by "webs of co-conspirators."
An easy way to track down associates. Further, merely using an
encrypted phone with a "racketeer-influenced" person could conceivably
enmesh one in the conspiracy. (This is merely speculation.)

Whatever happened to the "phone remailer" project? The idea, floated
about 15 months ago by parties who can speak up should they wish to (I
only contributed some ideas, but was not the originator), was to
create commercial phone banks that would scramble the origin and
destination of call. Somewhat like call forwarding schemes (which
wreak havoc with some wiretap procedures) and like the old stand-by of
renting a room and having one phone wired to another phone.

The idea here was to put these capabilities into a central switch and
sell access, various optional services, etc.

Out of the country would be even better. (Did you know that some of
those ee-vil 900 phone sex outfits have moved to non-U.S. locations?
Seems that U.S. law about blocking access, not to mention,
antipornography laws, doesn't apply in places like Tijuana.)

I could see some tie-ins with Voice PGP (the Soundblaster-based
projects supposedly being worked on by several different groups).


--Tim May

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