[5652] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Why did White House change its mind on crypto?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter D. Junger)
Fri Sep 17 16:13:40 1999
Message-Id: <199909171730.NAA28498@samsara.law.cwru.edu>
To: jaltman@columbia.edu
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 17 Sep 1999 12:29:56 EDT."
<CMM.0.90.4.937585796.jaltman@watsun.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 13:30:41 -0300
From: "Peter D. Junger" <junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu>
Jeffrey Altman writes:
: > I agree it's scary. What's the difference between that, and being
: > stopped on a dark road at 2AM by a state trooper? I was, and it was
: > scary, because he kept asking me if I had any guns, and he wanted to
: > see what was inside the foil candy wrapper on my dashboard (more
: > foil), but obviously he expected that it was hash. But what if he
: > handed back some hash wrapped in foil? What would I have done? At
: > that point, I've got drugs, and he knows it, and he could arrest me.
: > What's the difference between that, and someone claiming that a
: > certain piece of text decrypts to a sinister message?
: >
: > Seems to me like the best defense against that is mass-market crypto.
: > Because if the TLA claims that something decrypts to something, and I
: > can use the mass-market crypto to have it decrypt to something else,
: > the TLA has a credibility problem.
: >
: > Or is this not why you're scared?
:
: There are two problems with the ability to produce evidence without
: specifying how you got it. If the Feds have a large amount of
: encrypted data. Maybe months of information and they were unable
: to decrypt it they could just make something and submit it to the
: court.
:
: If I decide that I want to challenge the evidence I am going to
: have to decrypt the message as provided by the court and document
: how I did it. Now I may have successfully challenged the submitted
: evidence but I have now been compelled to hand over my key which
: the government can now use to read the rest of the encrypted
: data.
It's far more scary than that. What makes you think that the file that
they decrypt was encrypted in the first place?
--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
EMAIL: junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu URL: http://samsara.law.cwru.edu
NOTE: junger@pdj2-ra.f-remote.cwru.edu no longer exists
