🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov11.061210.9933@cactus.org> ritter@cactus.org (Terry Ritter) writes:
>Although the discussion of key registration has been interesting,
>it does seem a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.
	Wrong.  Hiding computer data from the law enforcement types is more 
	like shooting fish in a barrel.  In fact its kind of like dynamiting
	fish in a barrel.

>    The police bust an alleged child molester, and take possession
>    of his PC.  They believe that the hard drive contains a full
>    database of young kids who have been *or may be* assaulted.
>    That database is enciphered.
>
> Now, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to defend
> cryptography to ordinary voters, congress people and newspaper
> reporters.  You also need to explain to a relative of one of those
> kids, someone who doesn't own or work with a computer, why the
> government should "allow" private cryptography which could hide
> this sort of information.
	I don't have to defend cryptography to anyone.  The point
	isn't that they won't outlaw cryptography but that it won't
	do any good for what they think they are trying to do.

	What makes you think that the police would even find his
	database?  How are the police going to distinguish the encrypted
	database from random binary shit on this guys disks? 
	Do you think the cops try to decrypt all files called *.EXE?
	What about files full of floating point numbers?  
	What if they guy modifies his DOS image so that there are
	files that don't even appear?  Are they going to look at his
	file allocation table to look for anomalies?  Would they
	know one if they saw it?  Suppose his modified DOS image knows
	that certain parts of the free block table are really not
	free and correspond to his encrypted database.  How are the
	cops going to distinguish these blocks from random binary
	stuff left around in free blocks on his disk?  Suppose he
	has hundreds of floppies?  Are they going to analyze them all
	for very subtle discrepancies?  

	The problem here is that people are assuming that the law
	enforcement types know something about computers.  NOTHING
	could be further from the truth.  My 10 year old daughter
	knows more about computers than the D.A.  


						smg