Re: Public vs. Private Munitions

["Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>]

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On Sat, 27 Jul 1996, Erle Greer wrote:

> Here's how I understand it:
>      The U.S. Government, concerned only with making America a safer place
> for us taxpayers to live in, wants to regulate domestic encryption in order
> to have access to the content of all transmissions.  Their theory is that
> any cryptosystem that is stronger than their cryptanalysis systems can be
> used in illegal transmissions and should be considered munitions.
>      Theoretically, the government should only be have the resources to
> control commercially-available, public encryption systems.  Who is to stop
> anyone from designing their own cryptosystem for personal use?  If the
> government intercepted a transmission from this private cryptosystem, and
> could not decrypt it, would they assume that it must be considered
> munitions?  Similarly, anyone could send uniformly-formatted random garble
> that could also be considered munitions, or at least waste the governments
> processing time.
>      Why are we so worried about government regulation?  Can't we just
> devise our own cryptosystems and just don't sell them or make them publicly
> available?

If encryption is regulated and outlawed, then Joe Sixpack won't have access to
any none Government Approved encryption algorithms.  I may still have access
to strong crypto, but if it isn't widespread, I won't be able to use it very
effectively.  As to your question about whether random data would be outlawed,
it certainly wouldn't surprise me.  Of course, one could always apply for
permission to transmit random data that is not used to transmit encrypted
information from the government.

- -- Mark

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