Re: The FBI/NSA's new escrow argument, DC crypto panel

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

At 05:46 PM 5/6/96 -0400, Declan B. McCullagh wrote:
>I just came back from the Online Services Industry conference held today
>in Washington, DC at the Georgetown Four Seasons. It was very much a DC
>thing, organized by Congressmen Jack Fields and Rick White (of the
>Internet Caucus).
>
>The fourth panel was "Law Enforcement and Encryption in Cyberspace,"
>with this set of characters:
>
> * Edward Allen, supervisory special agent/section chief, FBI
> * Clinton Brooks, advisor to the director, NSA
> * Dorothy Denning, professor, Georgetown University
> * Bruce Heiman, attorney, Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds
> * Jim Lucier, director of economic research, Americans for Tax Reform
> * Marc Rotenberg, director, EPIC

>The FBI's Allen said: "We have talked to our foreign law enforcement
>counterparts who are concerned with exporting strong crypto. Crime is
>increasing internationally... There is not an international free market
>for crypto. To a great degree, other nations have been relying on U.S.
>export controls to maintain stasis. What bothers me about efforts being
>proposed legally is that we're moving forward without understanding what
>we're getting into... The efforts can go to order or chaos. We're in a
>period where it could go to chaos."

Maybe there's a sort of backhanded solution to this.  I recall the story 
that, in the early 1970's, it was sport in MIT's AI Labs to try to crash the 
Unix computer.  More and more protections were added, which eventually were 
worked around with more failures.  Eventually, they found a beautiful 
solution:  Add a command to the operating system, "Crash the computer!" 
which did exactly this.  Suddenly, this goal became devalued, and nobody 
wanted to crash the computer anymore.

Okay, what if a foreign distributor (very tiny, perhaps) was set up that 
loudly proclaimed that it would sell any crypto only legally available in 
the US, but had been smuggled out by people unknown and sent to it 
anonymously.  (It would verify the genuineness by sending it back into the 
US, for verification, etc.)  It announces that it is pleased to sell to 
everybody ESPECIALLY "terrorists, child-pornographers, drug smugglers, and 
other criminals."   To keep from angering the software writers themselves, 
it would pay appropriate royalties to those whose works they had sold, but 
obviously they wouldn't ask permission to do this.

At that point, any argument against the export of such software will fail, 
because the software already has a willing supplier overseas.  Yes, this is 
the way it already it, sorta, but the difference is that there is nobody who 
enthusiastically claims that this is exactly what they're doing.  
Representatives of such a distributor can be called upon to appear at any 
debates, hearings, or other activities in order to spoil the arguments of 
Denning et al.


Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com