🚀 go-pugleaf

Dr. Denning suggests that we should all have to register our keys to
make law enforcement's job easier.  I disagree, for lots of reasons.
One reason is banking security.  Banks and other wire-transfer services
are probably the largest non-governmental users of encryption;
banking standards generally use DES-based systems to transfer money.
The systems are already less than perfect, and forcing registration of
all keys with the government would only decrease the security.

The Government don't currently have the right to wiretap all banking
communications, though it does already pry into our private financial
transactions far more than is acceptable in a free society;
giving it the keys to all transactions substantially increases the
ability of a government agency to decide that it NEEDS to inspect all
communications from Bank X to Bank Y to see when Suspicious Citizen Z
is making his transactions, and therefore they need a warrant to get
the keys out of the registry, and while they've got the key they'll
use it to inspect other traffic as well.  

In the past, to get banking records, they either had to ask the bank
nicely or serve a warrant on them, which gives the bank's lawyers a
chance to intervene and make sure only the "right" records are inspected.
With a registry, all they have to do is serve a warrant on the 
Federal Institute for National Keyregistration, which will probably be answered
by the FINKs' lawyers without the bank having a chance to intervene.
Even if the bank IS notified, they're no longer handing over specific records,
which gives them control over which aaccounts are searched,
they're handing over the keys to the system, and the cops get to
examine the financial records in private, without supervision by the banks.

This vastly increases their ability to go on fishing expeditions,
since ANY bank probably has some customer who's a drug user or tax evader 
or who might be moving money around without telling the Feds, 
which is illegal because you might be using the money for something illegal.
Now we're talking about making it illegal to have private conversations,
because you might be talking about moving money around.

Dr. Denning contends that these aren't the old COINTELPRO days any more.
Even if you trust the Clinton Administration to be better behaved than
its predecessors under Nixon or Bush or J.Edgar, and I guess I do,
that's not enough - I'd rather have my privacy STAY adequately protected
when Ollie North becomes President after the economic collapse of 1995 :-).
Gambler's Ruin theory says that the house always wins in the long run,
and bad governments are NOT rare events.  
Remember World War II, when the Army used census data to find where
all the Japanese in California lived?  Sure, you're proposing that the
registry keep the keys private for now, but will they STAY private?

If key registration DOES become mandatory, I hope it's at least free -
there are about 2**32 session keys I plan to register .... only 1/2 :-).
2**32 isn't a lot, but you can use more than one at a time,
and registering 2**64 of them is rather tedious.
--
#				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.