🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1cjrskINNd2@gap.caltech.edu> hal@cco.caltech.edu (Hal Finney) writes:

>[...]
>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? [...]

In the context of this discussion it should be noted that -- at least in
this country, but probably elsewhere as well -- the post office people
are discouraging their customers from sending "old-fashioned" letters.
By increasing the fees and cutting on the service they actually force
business customers to switch to fax (or e-mail) communications, and the
same will apply to the private sector before long.

While routine screening or tapping of conventional mail is cumbersome
and expensive, it is very easy to record electronic communications for
immediate or later analysis (and decryption).

It would (IMHO) be paranoid to assume that the security agencies were
responsible for the deterioration of the postal services -- there are
a lot of more practical reasons involved. The fact, however, that we'll
totally depend on electronic communications in the near future makes the
privacy of these communications an absolutely vital point, and we have
to fight for it as long as the alternatives still exist.
--
Detlef Lannert      DC3EK      E-Mail: tsos@rz.uni-duesseldorf.de
"Gedanken sind nicht stets parat,
man schreibt auch, wenn man keine hat."             Wilhelm Busch