From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 1997 15:31:12 -0700 (PDT)
To: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
Subject: [Key Markets] Re: "...markets are fundamentally chaotic, not efficient"?
In-Reply-To: <v0302092eaf6ea75718f6@[139.167.130.246]>
Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19970409120317.005e53f8@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Crispin and Hettinga discussing efficient markets for key bailment:

>> In a geodesic network, a single node can not possibly process all
>> the information in the network. It chokes, and the network routes 
>> around it. 
>> You can bet that any key escrow agent would be innundated with
>> surveillance requests 

We're not talking about a lot of bits, here.
If you take care of the hard problem, which is getting people to hand 
their keys over to easily located key baliffs for no good business reason,
the amount of retrieval work is really a lot smaller than the 
work of wiretapping all the communications and selecting targets.
If the government expects to get the key owners to pay for bailment,
and get retrievals for free in return for paper copies of warrants
blue-ink-signed by judges, in triplicate, with hand-pressed notary seals,
yes, that'd be a bottleneck.  On the other hand, if the key bailiffs
accept electronic requests, digitally signed by the judge's key,
with electronic payment attached (whether DigiCash or EscrowBucks),
the costs of the key bailment service are quite low and the profit on
each request makes it worthwhile to expand the business to meet 
rapidly-increasing demand - cheap enough to the government to make it
worth wiretapping more encrypted transactions.   
Since the Secretary gets to approve Key Recovery Agent Parties,
he can disavow all knowledge of agents who insist on a real signature
and want to be sure the request was signed by a real judge rather than
by some clerk or cop using the Escrowed copy of the judge's key.


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
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