🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct29.010208.17901@wdl.loral.com> mab@wdl39.wdl.loral.com (Mark A Biggar) writes:
   Sorry, this doesn't work because you can tell the illicit traffic from the legal
   traffic unless you already have the keys.  Anyone wanting to send illicit
   messages just registers any key and then uses a different key.  Unless you
   have the key you can't tell if the registered key was used or not.  

But with public keys, you *do* have the keys - presumably the Feds have
your public key as well as your private key and probably your email address,
so they can take some random sample of messages (maybe even 100%), and
validate whether the recipient's public key will work for the message.
If it doesn't, they seize the recipient's computer equipment on suspicion 
and get a warrant to force them to reveal the key if they want it back :-(   

An interesting question is WHO do they bust - the sender or the recipient?
If the recipient, then it's easy to frame someone by sending them a message 
with an unregistered key - how can you PROVE you don't have a private key 
hidden somewhere that can decrypt that message?   Even a misrouted
message could get you in trouble, and recent cases such as Steve
Jackson Games, etc., show that guilty-until-proven-innocent has become
the de facto rule, and is well on its way to de jure in this arena.

But if they bust the sender, that means they have to know who the
sender is, and (under a "just" draconian law) that the sender knowingly
used an unregistered key, but in reality, ignorance can get you busted.
This forces the sender of every email message to always verify the
registration of the recipient's key to prevent harassment, 
or else to always get the key from a known source, keeping records
that let the sender pass the responsibility on to the keymaster.
I sure wouldn't want to be a public key certifier under those conditions.
If the Feds don't go quite that far, there's an obvious market for an
anonymous mailforwarding system, deliberately memoryless to make
messages relatively untraceable.  It MIGHT have to be located outside the US,
but I can easily see a ban on cross-border transmission of encrypted messages.

--
#				Pray for peace;      Bill
#Bill Stewart 908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.ho.att.com AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ
# Trickle-Down Economics: Giving money to government bureaucrats 
#	and hoping some will trickle down to the people who need help.