🚀 go-pugleaf

As Terry Ritter points out, Ron Rivest made a similar proposal
in the July, 1992 CACM.  Rivest concludes with:


"While this approach may have its own difficulties,
it does illustrate that weak cryptography is not the only technical
approach available.  There may be much better techniques for achieving
a compromise between a number of conflicting national concerns."


Despite Rivest's suggestion that this "compromise" could "satisfy all
parties", I find it strongly objectionable.  I fail to see what right
the government has to force users to give up the privacy of their
communications.  These measures are what I would expect from Orwell's
_1984_ rather than a modern Western government.

Cryptography is just one means used to protect the privacy of
communications.  Other means can include secret (hidden) messages,
face-to-face meetings, whispering, coded messages (which appear to
say one thing but mean something different), and so on.  If the
government is cracking down on one of these, it may be a step towards
restrictions on the others.

If the principle being espoused is that the government needs to have
the ability to discover the content of all private communication, then
what about face-to-face conversations?  Should they be required to be
recorded, with the tapes then "escrowed" pending a court order allowing
them to be revealed?  If not, then exactly which communications does the
government have the right to force users to reveal?  And where did those
rights come from?

I also think it's interesting that these proposals appear just as public-
key cryptography is starting to become widespread, with the forthcoming
release of PEM, and such packages as Riordan's RIPEM and Zimmermann's PGP
starting to spread.  The government never tried to get us to "escrow" our
DES keys, for some reason.  Maybe they didn't need to; maybe the rumors
that the government could break DES were true all along.  Otherwise why
is this idea appearing now instead of fifteen years ago?

--
Hal Finney                                       hal@alumni.caltech.edu