[117244] in Cypherpunks
RE: ACTION ALERT: Crypto Legislation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lucky Green)
Sun Aug 29 17:23:57 1999
Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 17:03:49 -0400
Message-Id: <NDBBIFGOKODBCKDGJDKLIEMJCEAA.shamrock@cypherpunks.to>
From: "Lucky Green" <shamrock@cypherpunks.to>
To: Multiple recipients of list <cypherpunks@openpgp.net>
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Reply-To: "Lucky Green" <shamrock@cypherpunks.to>
> SEC. 14. FAILURE TO DECRYPT INFORMATION OBTAINED UNDER COURT ORDER.
>
> Whoever is required by an order of any court to provide to the court
> or any other party any information in such person's possession which has
> been encrypted and who, having possession of the key or such other
> capability to decrypt such information into the readable or comprehensible
> format of such information prior to its encryption, fails to provide such
> information in accordance with the order in such readable or
> comprehensible form--
> (1) in the case of a first offense under this section,
> shall be imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or fined under
> title 18, United States Code, or both; and
> (2) in the case of second or subsequent offense under this
> section, shall be imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or
> fined under title 18 United States Code, or both.
These penalties are of course accrued on a per-act basis. Each email you
fail to decrypt would be a separate offense if this bill passes. Five years
for the first email you fail to decrypt, 10 years for all subsequent emails.
Let's see... There are currently 8 encrypted emails in my inbox. That's 1 *
5 years + 7 * 10 years = 75 years in the federal penitentiary if I was to
fail to decrypt my current inbox alone. Never mind all the encrypted emails
in the other folders. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that if that
bill passes and I was to fail to decrypt all the emails on my drive, I'd be
looking at several millennia in prison.
For file or disk encryption, where each undecrypted would constitute a
separate offense, the figures would be even higher.
--Lucky
