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Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1994-07-22 - Re: “Key Escrow” — the very idea

Header Data

From: solman@MIT.EDU
To: Mike_Spreitzer.PARC@xerox.com
Message Hash: 70d2919885b431d7b34bd2d1f6a73defa1ac9a0c46c64c19c519b0de39a7c27e
Message ID: <9407221537.AA15026@ua.MIT.EDU>
Reply To: <94Jul22.082855pdt.14405(2)@alpha.xerox.com>
UTC Datetime: 1994-07-22 15:38:08 UTC
Raw Date: Fri, 22 Jul 94 08:38:08 PDT

Raw message

From: solman@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 94 08:38:08 PDT
To: Mike_Spreitzer.PARC@xerox.com
Subject: Re: "Key Escrow" --- the very idea
In-Reply-To: <94Jul22.082855pdt.14405(2)@alpha.xerox.com>
Message-ID: <9407221537.AA15026@ua.MIT.EDU>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> Eight pieces seems too few to me.  It's too easy for gov't agencies to "lean
> on" eight individuals or organizations (someone else suggested "watchdog"
> groups as fragment holding agencies, but that doesn't seem very good.  Groups
> can change over time, respond to pressure.  Putting a lot of fragments in a
> few hands seems fairly fundamentally flawed).  I'd rather see thousands.

The point here is that if the evil government wants to go busting in on
your conversations without a warrant, it can't. Even if they cheated and
looked in the escrow for the names of you secret holders, they'd have to
show them a warrant. The government couldn't try pressuring that many people
before one of them blabbed and that would lose those folks doing the
pressuring their jobs and quite probably result in prison time and political
ramifications.

I still don't like the idea of escrows because it assumes that I have
something to hide, but if you have to do an escrow, I thing eight people
is fine.

JWS

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