🚀 go-pugleaf

 In <1992Nov11.095811.27796@cs.ruu.nl> piet@cs.ruu.nl (Piet van Oostrum)
 writes:

>>>>> ritter@cactus.org (Terry Ritter) (TR) writes:

>TR>     The police bust an alleged child molester, and take possession
>TR>     of his PC.  They believe that the hard drive contains a full
>TR>     database of young kids who have been *or may be* assaulted.
>TR>     That database is enciphered.
>
>Yeah and would you think he would just encipher it with a registered key?

 Well, no, considering that my original post included:

>>criminals
>>would not register keys anyway.

 The point is that a future society might demand that enciphered
 information be made available to proper authorities, after due
 process, and if that was *not* done, this could itself constitute
 a crime.


>Or think of the following scenario: Het isn't so stupid to put the database
>in his computer, but he has it on paper in a vault with a combination lock.
>What is the difference? (by the way, the vault destroys its contents when
>it is forcefully opened).

 First of all, society may well think that an auto-destroy safe is
 sufficiently rare as to not be worth addressing.  However, the same
 law that required cryptography users to retain information and keys
 might well prohibit the use of auto-destroy safes, auto-destruct
 Mission Impossible tape machines, self-melting CD's and various
 other such devices.  Evidence of such use might constitute a crime.
 The use of magnetic tape bulk erasers might be a crime in some
 cases.

 Look, I proposed this issue to help crystalize the opposing point
 of view, so that we could see the strength of those arguments,
 formulate a response, and estimate how effective the response
 would be.  The particular scenario is irrelevant:  I have no doubt
 that many examples could be concocted involving terrorists,
 mass-murder, assassination, etc.

 The issue is *not* what I think, nor what *you* think; the issue
 is the extent to which these arguments would convince ordinary
 people and legislators to pass a law limiting the use of secrecy
 technology.

 A related issue is the extent to which we could live with such
 regulations, but I really fail to see how individual resistance
 could do much about it; secrecy crimes might just replace drug
 crimes in filling our prisons.  Individuals could burn five years
 of their lives on this, only to get out sadder and wiser, and
 unable to get a job anywhere.  Is this a reasonable response?

 Alternately, we could just sit back and expect the courts and
 The Constitution to protect secrecy in the US, and they might,
 but I wouldn't count on it.

 ---
 Terry Ritter   ritter@cactus.org