Re: gack vs. key escrow vs. key recovery

["Douglas B. Renner" <dougr@skypoint-gw.globelle.com>]

On Thu, 3 Oct 1996, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
> 
> it is clear we are coming to a fork in the road at this moment.
> there are going to be two types of cpunk opinions based on recent
> developments.
> 
> 1. those who feel that wiretapping was illegitimate from the
> start and are working to make wiretapping impossible. confronted
> with a legal search warrant/subpoena etc. for personal data, 
> they would not hand over keys. they would "superencrypt" in
> systems that do etc.
> 
> 2. those who feel that there is such a thing as a legal warrant
> or subpoena for information protected by cryptography keys, and
> would agree that this logically means that governments will be
> getting access to "key recovery" infrastructures.
> 

If I correctly understand what you are saying, I agree with your thesis 
that people who are stuck in an antiestablishment frame of mind may just 
as easily hinder their own cause by acting blindly.

But if we make a distinction between two very different levels and types 
of wiretapping, I believe a sizeable third category becomes apparent:

3. Those who are aware of the existence of large-scale systems of
electronic monitoring by the NSA, which does not need any search
warrant or subpoena of any kind to collect, archive, index, correlate, 
interpret & summarize the supposedly private communications of all of us.

When presented with an actual search warrant, people who have this 
awareness would typically cooperate with any law enforcement agencies, 
since they would also be aware of how impractical noncooperation would 
be.  Far from considering the government as always bad, they may only 
have a healthy mistrust of those branches of big government which can 
operate both above the law and behind a cloak of secrecy.

People in category 3 may be aware of the pure power of knowledge which 
can be extracted from large data mines, and simply desire to exclude as 
much of their personal communications from these mines as possible.  They 
are not comforted by an encryption system where keys could be recovered 
without one's knowledge, and see this as a threat to the current growth 
of truly unbreakable systems.

Former US Senator Dave Durenburger, while still head of the Senate Select 
Intelligence Committee, remarked to the press that he wondered if CIA 
Director William Casey enacted covert plots "just for kicks."

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, is it not our civic duty to 
ensure that the former does not come into being?

Douglas B. Renner