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Re: Crypto use to foil law enforcement?
At 02:36 AM 5/19/97 -0700, Greg Broiles wrote:
>I ran across this entry in the Congressional Record which discusses several
>examples where encryption was discovered in the course of a law enforcement
>investigation.
>
>[Congressional Record: September 18, 1996 (Senate)][Page S10882-S10886]
>
>[...]
>
>Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I'm pleased that the Senate has passed
>the eonomic espionage bill. This is an important measure that I believe
[...]
> The third case, however, especially illustrates the seriousness of
>decryption problems--determining the unique key or in this case,
>password from a large number of possibilities. According to Agent
>Davis, a mere 4 character password has 1.9 million possibilities due to
>the number of keyboard characters. Can you imagine how difficult it
>must be to figure a short, 4 character password. What if the password
>were 10 characters or 20 or more? It's easy to see why criminals are
>moving toward password protection for their records.
With the congress so woefully uninformed that they confuse password
protection with cryptography and naive enough to believe that 1.9E6
possibilities represents a serious roadblock to entry, it looks like we have
a major education effort to perform.
It is interesting that there were no examples in this summary of crypto used
for communications -- but that's completely consistent with what we've been
hearing all along.
- Carl
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