Re: NIST GAK export meeting, short version

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 07:11 AM 12/6/95 -0400, pfarrell@netcom.com wrote:
>They claimed it was needed so that they can serve a court order
>that is SECRET. ....
>The main area that they claimed was for FISA orders. 

Maybe this is just an artifact of Pat's wording, but this sounds
like there may be classified court orders other than FISA?

> Plus, since you have to be a US citizen to get a clearence, 
> how can there be approved foreign escrow agents?

By deals with the foreign governments, presumably reciprocal.
The US would allow export of software using the escrow keys for
Banque du Commerce et Credit Internationale - Paris, if the
bank and the French spooks signed an agreement for escrow access,
and in return the US would probably agree to give the French 
access to some US-escrowed keys (with proper requests, of course.)

>And the usual, why in hell would a competent spy use
>crypto escrowed in the US?

Competent spies appear to be a surprisingly small fraction of
even government-employed espionage personnel, or maybe long-term
espionage is just inherently difficult the Soviet Empire,
Nazi Germany, and WWII Britain had all identified most of the spy
rings operating against them.  Philip Agee's article on how to
identify the CIA agents in a US embassy may have surprised the CIA,
but wouldn't have given any significant new information to the KGB.
(They might have been surprised he'd _say_ it...)
And amateurs and newcomers to the business aren't always that good.

Also, maybe a spy would be using GAKed crypto to avoid attracting
attention.  Much of espionage, especially emerging economic espionage,
primarily uses open-source information; there's nothing too secret
about sending the latest SAIC want-ads from EE Times back home,
but the CIA may learn what targets you're watching by watching
enough of your traffic to guess at your filtering criteria.

And sometimes you're just stuck on the Beltway and have to use your
car phone to say you'll be a bit late dropping off the secret plans.
#--
#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0663 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281

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