🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Nov3.090942.1626@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu> denning@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu writes:

>If law enforcement loses the ability to conduct court-authorized 
>taps, they will have to use other means if even possible, such as
>breaking and entering.  This is not necessarily better in terms of
>protecting liberties and privacy.
> 

YES IT IS.  Law enforcement is likely to leave some evidence if they are
physically present.  Tapping bits may leave no trail.  I would like a
requirement that (1) all wiretaps must be performed by a public utility
company, and (2) they must publish the list of numbers tapped within 1 year
of the tap.  With (1), there is a reasonable chance that the FBI won't
perform undocumented taps, because, if found out, the person being tapped
probably cannot be prosecuted at all .  With (2), if someone is tapped,
they would eventually find out, and be able to sue the government for
invasion of privacy.  However, this paragraph is not relevent to sci.crypt,
the group I am reading this thread on.

...

>I believe I said this before, but let me remind everyone that the
>government has not proposed that keys be registered.

That's because they don't see any benefit to it, unless they routinely 
decrypt messages to ensure that people are using only registered keys. 
(It's time to bring back the thread on braided stream encryption --- that
shows a benefit to adding random streams to multiple messages, so law
enforcement cannot be assured that all the plaintext from an encrypted
message has been decrypted.)

>...  I believe that 
>Ron Rivest was the first to make this suggestion.

His interest is that he claims that most encryption is covered by his
patent, so he has a right to the registered keys as a liscensing
requirement.  I don't know what your motives are --- I am forced to assume
that you think registering keys would be of benefit to law enforcement, in
spite of evidence to the contrary.  
--
Arthur L. Rubin: a_rubin@dsg4.dse.beckman.com (work) Beckman Instruments/Brea
216-5888@mcimail.com 70707.453@compuserve.com arthur@pnet01.cts.com (personal)
My opinions are my own, and do not represent those of my employer.
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