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- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Repent Security Incorporated [www.repsec.com]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 12:55:51 PDT