🚀 go-pugleaf

Politics aside for a second, there's an interesting crypto problem here.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we wanted to let all the phone
companies sell encrypting modems and voice scramblers using triple DES
for the stream encryption (with 3 keys) and RSA for key exchange.

(I'm not promising to send only plaintext to these encrypting modems,
but many people would.)

The purpose is to help thwart industrial espionage and hacker entry.

-------

Now, how do we provide for today's level of wiretapping and still protect
the rights of the individual?

We should be able to design a protocol/system such that:

1.	a digitally signed court order to do a specific wiretap must be
	presented to unbribable/uncrackable machinery in order to recover
	one session key.

2.	digitally signed court orders have expiration dates -- and short
	lives.

3.	an audit of all taps performed is sent immediately to the US major
	news services, encrypted under a key which will become available
	to them after some decent delay (2 days?) and the availability
	of which can not be prevented.

This prevents both un-ordered wiretaps and wiretaps performed because
some judge is in the pocket of the Executive Branch (thanks to news
audit of all taps performed -- of the fact of the tap and the target and
originator, not of the content of the tapped conversation or of the
session key).

#3 is an interesting cryptographic problem.  #1 isn't too bad either.
#2 is straight-forward.



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-- <<Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are my own, of course.>>
-- Carl Ellison						cme@sw.stratus.com
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