🚀 go-pugleaf

dallet@ozemail.com.au (Michael Wines) wrote:

> ryan@zip.com.au (Patrick Ryan) wrote:
> 
> >5. Will the legislation make it easier to catch peadophiles ?
> 
> >It will merely force the perpertrators to use readily available
> >encryption techniques which will require police forces to use multiple
> >supercomputers (which they don't have)  in order to read a simple
> >message. This combined with the daily exponential increase in network
> >traffic will only make it difficult for police agencies.
> 
> They might make encryption illegal. Or they might mandate
> encryption techniques which allow spies and secret police to
> decrypt any message. The digital mobile phone encryption in
> Australia is organised this way. The Federal Police and the
> spy agencies have the encryption keys to allow them to
> listen to conversations on digital mobile phones.

In which case perpetrators will start using steganography - embedding
encrypted information in a data file that appears quite normal.  There have
been programs available on the net for years that do this.  It's probably
impossible in almost every case to prove that someone is using that
technique to get around encryption laws.

> >6. Perpertrators can fake their mail addresses making it next to
> >impossible to prove that a person sent the offending transmission.
> 
> Oddly enough this is the reason the Senate Committee into
> Internet Censorship suggested mandating strong encryption -
> to make it mandatory to create encrypted digital signatures
> on all messages, so that people couldn't hide their
> identities.

Won't "they" just start using fake digital signatures?  What's to stop
someone creating a new public/private key pair and using that to provide a
"signature", or faking the signature data itself?  Is *every* e-mail
message going to have its signature verified against some sort of massive
database containing everyone's registered public keys (rather like the
Australia Card for those who use e-mail)?  This will either become a
further burden on ISPs, or will again raise the spectre of Big Brother if
it's done at some central (government?) server - which will crash every so
often, disabling e-mail for everyone in the state...

Have fun,
	Mazz.

mazz@faceng.newcastle.edu.au