Re: Why is cryptoanarchy irreversible?

[ph@netcom.com (Peter Hendrickson)]

At 4:00 PM 11/7/1996, Jim McCoy wrote:
>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 :)

If mandatory GAK were imposed, reviewing messages is easy, even with
inter-agency fighting.  Or, encryption in general could just be
forbidden if GAK created too much hassle.

> 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.

In practice I suspect that good stego is hard.  You don't have to be
right every time when you look for it, just some of the time.  When
you see packets that seem kind of funny to you, the judge issues you
a warrant and you search the suspect's house and computer very carefully.
If stego is in use, the software that generated it can be found.  Then
you hand out a life sentence.

Yes, this would be somewhat expensive.  But if the number of suspects
is small, it is completely feasible.

You might also identify suspects in other ways.  Maybe that Jim McCoy
is looking a little too successful or perhaps he made an unwise comment
to a "friend" who reported him.  That could easily be grounds for a
warrant and subsequent change of quarters.

> 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.)

Which technicalities protected the Japanese-Americans during World War II?
As you probably know, these people were not protected by our legal system.
Their bank accounts were frozen and they were forced to sell their property
in less than two weeks.  They were effectively stripped of their assets.
Then, they were carted off to concentration camps and left there for years.
This was allowed to happen because there was strong public support for it.

The legal system would have to be stretched considerably less to outlaw
strong crypto and make it stick.

Peter Hendrickson
ph@netcom.com