Re: How I Would Ban Strong Crypto in the U.S.

[David Sternlight <david@sternlight.com>]

At 7:03 AM -0700 7/15/96, Michael Froomkin wrote:
>On Sun, 14 Jul 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
>
>> So, who is in this "emerging consensus"?
>>
>Foreign governments?
>(Process of elimination, not inside info...)

Perhaps. And the vast inside-the-Beltway policy community, most of whom are
more like Dorothy Denning than Tim May. And the vast business community
that prefers automated escrow in standard systems. What I mean by that is
software or chips automatically escrowed to, say, Price Waterhouse.
Business is comfortable dealing with such firms in a trusted relationship,
and such firms will honor a valid court order to produce records or the
equivalent--a probable cause court-order for a wiretap.

It really depends on how the issue is presented. If it is presented as
preserving law enforcement access, escrow follows. The problem is that like
the nose of the camel, each new piece of legislation establishes a new
status quo baseline of principle from which to argue, and though we all
kicked and screamed about it here, the new baseline is the Digital
Telephony Act.

As for the only counterargument to the above, that bad guys aren't going to
use escrowed systems, nothing is perfect, goes the argument, and the FBI
has caught plenty of bad guys who presumably should have known better, via
wiretaps.

If you look into it, you will find that most people with criminal minds
don't expect to get caught.

Given the nature of this group it perhaps needs saying that the above is a
competitor analysis, not an argument nor my own position on mandatory
domestic key escrow. I'm agin it.

David