Re: Anti-Electronic Racketeering Act of 1995

[stewarts@ix.netcom.com (Bill Stewart)]

At 06:06 PM 7/17/95 +0200, Hadmut Danisch wrote:
>1. If the bill becomes law, how can someone who violates it be
>punished? 
Only by violating the Constitution and basic common sense,
but that doesn't usually bother the Government very much...

>2. Does someone who publishes software which encodes or encrypts 
>(ASCII is a code, isn't it?) have to prove that he has provided the
>universal decoder to the state or does the state have to prove that he
>didn't do? 

It's not defined in the law, and if the good Senator writes stupid offensive
laws which are so stupid that they have big holes in them like this,
I don't intend to correct him :-)

>In the former case, does he get any receipt from the department of
>justice and what does the receipt say (1.3MByte of software
>received...)?

Nobody knows.

>In the latter case, how do they want to prove he didn't? If he gave
>just a big 
>  for(i=0;;i++) try_key(i);
>how do they want to prove this doesn't work?  [... halting problem...]

The proposed law doesn't say that the mechanism has to decrypt the
message in a short period of time.  If the law passes, I'll be happy to help 
write the PGP Universal Decoder program for anybody who needs it to take to
court.
Some kinds of program are affected by the Halting Problem; other kinds
are easy to show that they halt.  For the PGP Universal Decoder,
trial division can find the factors for an N-bit key in much less than
2**N tries, if you program it well, and you know it will halt by then,
if the Universe hasn't decayed first.
#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com