🚀 go-pugleaf

Blandford's proposal has a fatal weakness. There's nothing to prevent
someone providing a nonsense key. To check this the government would
have to decrypt the traffic of citizens at least randomly, without any
warrants or probable cause. That goes far beyond the intent of
Blandford's proposal.

Of course they could make the furnishing of a false key itself an
offense, but they couldn't prosecute with clean hands unless the person
was already the subject of a probable cause warrant permitting access
to his traffic. At that point, unless the penalties for furnishing a
false key were more severe than those for the crimes the decrypted
traffic might reveal, he could choose the lesser penalties.

That leaves the innocent civilian caught up in a mistaken probable
cause warrant, who has chosen to furnish a false key. He could
probably purge himself of the charge by furnishing a real key at that
point and plead mitigation on the basis of his interpretation of the
Constitution. The sentence would likely be light if the Feds insisted
on prosecution, but more likely the embarassment and the possibility
of a constitutional challenge would cause them to go away quietly with
the real key

Meanwhile, those who furnished false keys and weren't the subject of
probably cause warrants would feel "safe in their persons, papers,
and effects."

Thus, I think the whole proposal unworkable, quite separate from  its
offensive civil liberties implications.