[13031] in Cypherpunks
Re: Lobbying/Politics/etc.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Humble)
Wed May 4 13:52:31 1994
Date: Wed, 04 May 1994 11:48:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: deeb@meceng.coe.neu.edu (Stephen Humble)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9405031055.A14425-0100000@netcom10> (message from Ed
Carp on Tue, 3 May 1994 10:56:59 -0700 (PDT))
To: ecarp@netcom.com
Cc: dave@marvin.jta.edd.ca.gov, cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: deeb@meceng.coe.neu.edu
X-Envelope-To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Ed Carp <ecarp@netcom.com> sez:
> Consider a successful terrorist attack against a significant
> group of innocents (the larger the number killed, the greater the horror
> and shock value). The terrorists were using PGP-encrypted email to plan
> out the thing.
>
> Now, how long do you think it would take before ALL crypto was outlawed?
> Who would benefit from such a thing? Consider that it's child's play to
> finance, arm, and train a group of people to conduct a terrorist attack
> and (conveniently) they all get killed in their attack. No one's going
> to complain too loudly - after all, they *are* terrorists, right?
I suspect significant problems implementing a law that criminalizes
crypto. The government currently spends $billions per year trying to
eliminate illegal drugs, to very little effect. Drugs should be
easier to eliminate than crypto since phys-obs can't be copied ad
infinitum as bits can.
There's also the matter of recognizing crypto in use. A program that
transforms its input so that the output can be converted back to the
input but has maximum entropy is a good compression program and might
also be an encryption program. If a TLA taps my phone and finds a
mysterious bit sequence, how can they distinguish reliably and cheaply
between an encrypted conversation and a download of
emacs-19.22.tar.gz?
I don't claim *they* can't try to outlaw crypto, and I certainly don't
claim they can't kill millions in the effort, but I *do* claim that
eliminating crypto is a very hard problem.
Inspired by my recently-arrived "Cypherpunk Criminal" t-shirt,
Stephen
