From: ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 15:24:53 PST
To: thug@phantom.com (Murdering Thug)
Subject: Re: the bill of rights hasn't been revoked. not yet, anyway.
In-Reply-To: <m0nFHGP-000jpaC@phantom.com>
Message-ID: <9301222323.AA05827@longs.lance.colostate.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


The Thug brings up some useful ideas of the constitution guaranteeing
the right to encryption.  The point that communication and encryption
are very similar is a very crucial idea.  However, he goes astray:

>I guess now you can see why the government is so scared of encryption.
>Widespread use of encryption on the part of the criminal class would
>simultaneously obsolete all police, the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and
>Department of Justice, or at the very least make their jobs several
>thousand orders of magnitude more difficult.  For example, a child
>pornography ring that trades anonymously in encrypted .gifs using
>truly anonymous remailers would be impossible to take down by just
>taking down one member of the ring. Furthermore, it may be impossible
>to prosecute even that one member.

This makes it sound as if criminals will suddenly find no obstacle to
their deviant behavior with the use of cryptography, a ridiculous
assertion.  Law enforcement will be made more difficult but arguably
the government has never legitimately had the "right" to wiretap, and
law enforcement will of course will never be "obsoleted" by technology.
 We must separate the activity of spying from the activity of law
enforcement (the agencies noted are in both categories).  The former
will be perhaps "thousand orders of magnitude more difficult" but the
latter will not be significantly affected, I'd wager (most criminals
are low tech). A Murdering Thug will be caught, eventually, when he
murders somebody regardless of his use of cryptography.

BTW, it annoys me that anyone thinks that law enforcement will be made
impossible when cryptography becomes widespread.  This extreme idea is
absolutely absurd.  Definitely, it will be affected, and perhaps some
"criminals" will not be caught that once might have.  But I suspect
that the criminals perpetrating the worst crimes, the ones civilized
people find most abhorrent and heinous, will be largely unaffected. 
There are far better ways to improve the currently inefficient and
often ineffective law enforcement techniques than by improving
wiretapping techniques.  Its funny how totalitarian governing systems
(the logical extent of completely outlawing cryptography) often manage
to find "criminals" where previously none existed.