Re: Sat phone permit "wire"taps

[tcmay@sensemedia.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 4:34 AM 7/28/95, John A. Limpert wrote:

>Is there a technical reason why communications through these future
>satellite systems couldn't be encrypted? I thought that all of these
>systems were based on vocoders and digital transmission, just like
>a secure telephone.

There should be no technical reason why voice encryption, or even
end-to-end digital packet encryption, cannot be used. The various satellite
systems (Iridium, Teledesic, Globalstar, etc.) also are targetting laptops,
personal communicators (a la Newton, Envoy, etc.), and thus cannot afford
to screw with the signal in any significant way. (And error correction
codes could easily deal with even fairly massive screwing around with,
should the satcom companies be foolish enough to try to "dither" the
signals....which I doubt they'll ever do.)

The risk is not technical, but legislative.

The government of the U.S. could, for example, mandate to the satcom
companies that only GAK/escrow encryption is permissable...how enforceable
this is echoes the debate we've had for almost three years on such things.

But the McCaw/Microsoft/Motorola/Qualcomm sorts of companies may have to
make token efforts to comply.

I don't expect the crypto banners to win, long run, but I would guess that
right now they are jawboning with the main satellite companies to make
things harder.

The faster systems like "Nautilus" are deployed, the better.

--Tim May

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