Re: Leahy bill, legalize crypto

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 06:14 PM 3/13/96 -0800, Tim wrote:
>One reason Washington pushed for the Wiretap Act (aka Digital Telephony)
>was because digital switches have made conventional methods of wiretapping
>and pen registers harder and harder to do. (I'm not a phone phreaker
>expert, as some of you no doubt are, so I don't know the details of how
>wiretaps were done prior to the advent of digital switches...I picture
>wires connected to the back of PBX systems, and I presume the ESS systems
>and their ilk changed this dramatically.)

There are different places you can do your wiretap, depending on
convenience, weather, observability, whether you've got a warrant, etc.
ESSs don't really change the pair of wire coming from your house
out to the telephone pole, over to your local wire center, and
into the distribution system that eventually connects them to the switch.
You've still got a pair of copper wires.  On the other hand,
underground wiring is harder to get at, and pair gain systems such as
Subscriber Loop Carrier bring some of the multiplexing out to your block
instead of all the way back to the phone office, and ESSs do make those
more cost-effective.  Connections from PBXs are also harder to tap than
individual phone lines, since your phone call may be on any of the (probably
virtual) circuits going from the PBX to the phone office.

>The main way they blew it is that the Wiretap Act ostensibly does not cover
>end-to-end encryption, especially as computers are used in place of
>telephones. 

I don't think they blew it there, although the EFF's work against S.266 a few
years back really hurt them.  There are two ways to get oppressive laws
enacted -
wholesale, or bit by bit.  A wholesale ban would have affected a lot of people,
and had substantial constitutional difficulties.  On the other hand,
a mere regulation telling the already regulated telephone companies that they
have to do a bit more free work in return for their monopoly status
isn't a big constitutional stretch, and mainly annoys phone companies
rather than end consumers.  Also, it's far easier to enforce regulations on
phone companies - there are bureaucrats in place to do it, you can kick them
around
in all sorts of ways if they don't cooperate, and it gets you most of your
wiretapping and enforcement done wholesale rather than retail.

(It's still major slime, of course :-)
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