🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov13.075430.8494@cactus.org> ritter@cactus.org (Terry Ritter) writes:

 [...]
> Prior to the advent of personal computers and strong cryptography,
> anything beyond what one could remember was, in the end, open to
> examination by society.  As far as I know, this was a traditional
> and accepted basis for much or most of Western society.  Personal
> computers and cryptography have changed the ability of (the agents
> of) society to perform that function, which might challenge the
> relationship between law enforcement and society at large.

NO.

"Prior to the advent of personal computers and strong cryptography,"
even simple codes (from today's point of view) were de facto unbreak-
able. A combination of a few of the 'cryptographic procedures' which
we used as kids and which have been around for centuries was enough
to make it impossible to decrypt a message: Without computers, even
a bunch of experts would have had a hard time to crack such a silly
cypher (unless they had sufficient plain/crypt text pairs etc.).

I'm sure many criminal offenders who encrypted their secret messages
using such a system got away unpunished because no ingenious master
mind such as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot happened to find out
the keys and algorithms by mere intuition.

Today a lot of attacks to all known cryptosystems can be done with
minimum resources within a few hours. Bad luck for the kids who want
to hide something from their mathematically skilled parents ...

But at the same time there are better algorithms around, and again the
experts have a hard time cracking them.

Why should this suddenly be a problem?
Why do you want special legislation right now?

Just wondering.
--
Detlef Lannert      DC3EK      E-Mail: tsos@rz.uni-duesseldorf.de
"Gedanken sind nicht stets parat,
man schreibt auch, wenn man keine hat."             Wilhelm Busch