Re: Devil's advocate

[Jim Gillogly <jim@acm.org>]

> Anonymous User <nobody@soda.berkeley.edu> writes:
> I see an argument of "what do you need to protect so badly that Clipper
> cannot work?  Are you doing something ILLEGAL?  Clipper works, and only

I suppose this has been answered so often that it doesn't make sense to
scrub over it again, but I'll give a few short answers anyway.

Answer 1:
    Wrong question: Once you allow the question "What do you have to hide?"
    about your communications, you don't have a good place to stop the
    inquiries about the rest of your life.  Law enforcement should not be
    allowed to dictate that you behave in a way that will facilitate their
    surveillance; they need to show probable cause <before> starting their
    proceedings against you.

Answer 2:
    Sometimes the advances of science favor the police, and sometimes they
    don't -- luck of the draw.  LE has a lot of tools available that they
    didn't have a few decades ago, including DNA matching, fiber analysis,
    and cellular phone triangulation.  Crypto may reduce one way for them
    to read our mail, but they have others that weren't available before;
    if they have reasonable cause for a court order, let them roll in the
    Van Eck radiation van, plant bugs, sneak in and dump your hard disk,
    or whatever.

Answer 3:
    Clipper's a crappy idea anyway.  The escrow concept is expensive and
    wouldn't be used by criminals as long as it's voluntary; it provides a
    single point of attack for non-governmental bad guys; and any red-neck
    sheriff who can convince a judge to issue a court order can get keys
    without the escrow agency even knowing that they're handing over the
    keys for the Republican state committee's phone system.

That's all independent of whether you can trust Mykotronx and their
masters not to keep copies of the keys while they're making them before
they put them in escrow.

	Jim Gillogly
	8 Afterlithe S.R. 1994, 01:25