Re: Why is cryptoanarchy irreversible?

[Jim McCoy <mccoy@communities.com>]

ph@netcom.com (Peter Hendrickson) writes:
[...]
>> Once a terrorist has strong crypto, why should they stop using it if it
>> becomes illegal?
>
>Use of strong crypto would be a tip off that one is a terrorist.
>
>If strong cryptography were unpopular and highly illegal, very few
>people would be using it.  This makes it easy to identify suspects.

But the difference between strong crypto and weak crypto is not
something which is visible to an outside observer unless they make
the effort to attack a particular system or decrypt a message.  Such
an attack is beyond the capacity of most municipal or state governements
and is a difficult and expensive task for federal agencies other than
the NSA (who would nto be pleased if their machines were suddenly at
the beck and call of the FBI or any other organization; never underestimate
the power of inter-agency infighting :) What make such detection even
harder is that a good crypto system generates output which is
indistinguishable from noise, this makes it much easier to hide the fact
that an encrypted channel is being used.  The funny thing about noise in
the information theory sense is that it can actually be _anything_ depending
on context, and this sort of uncertainty is the bane of a legal system
which is solidly grounded upon technicalities (such as the US legal system.)

jim