Re: [ISN] Strong Crypto Kills?

From: mea culpa (jerichoat_private)
Date: Sat Jun 13 1998 - 14:08:29 PDT

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    Reply From: "Russell Coker - mailing lists account" <bofhat_private>
    
    >As other people have said, why would the criminals suddenly balk at
    >committing the further crime of using 'illegal' encryption if they wanted to?
    >It's hardly a crime in the league of murder or whatever is it?
    
      If the law enforcement agencies want to ban strong encryption then they must
    also ban weak encryption (the type with government backdoors).  If all
    encryption is banned then it's not THAT difficult to discover people using it
    and arrest them.  If weak encryption is legal and the back-door is only open
    with the equivalent of a search warrant or wire-tap warrant then every smart
    criminal will encrypt their data with strong crypto and then with legal crypto
    afterwards.  So the police will need a warrant to crack the weak crypto to
    discover that they have strong crypto.
       I believe that back-door encryption is a joke and is not enforceable.  The
    only sane options are banning all crypto (as I believe France has done) and
    legalizing all crypto.  It seems that banning all crypto is not an option...
    
    ---
    This is the noise that keeps me awake
    
    [Moderator: Agreed and you make a good point. If someone is using a weak
     form of encryption, they can simply encrypt it 100 times with 100 keys
     and 100 different passphrases. While a pain in the ass and mostly being
     said for this argument, it would then force the government to crack all
     100 keys. Instead of say 1 hour to break, you move closer to 100 hours.
     If this is automated on the user end...]
    
    -o-
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