From: Carl Ellison <cme@cybercash.com>
Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 15:45:45 +0800
To: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@c2.net>
Subject: Re: Crypto use to foil law enforcement?
In-Reply-To: <199705201915.MAA22723@comsec.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19970523032158.00a8d9e0@cybercash.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 02:36 AM 5/19/97 -0700, Greg Broiles wrote:
>I ran across this entry in the Congressional Record which discusses several
>examples where encryption was discovered in the course of a law enforcement
>investigation. 
>
>[Congressional Record: September 18, 1996 (Senate)][Page S10882-S10886]
>
>[...]
>
>Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I'm pleased that the Senate has passed 
>the eonomic espionage bill. This is an important measure that I believe 

[...]

>  The third case, however, especially illustrates the seriousness of 
>decryption problems--determining the unique key or in this case, 
>password from a large number of possibilities. According to Agent 
>Davis, a mere 4 character password has 1.9 million possibilities due to 
>the number of keyboard characters. Can you imagine how difficult it 
>must be to figure a short, 4 character password. What if the password 
>were 10 characters or 20 or more? It's easy to see why criminals are 
>moving toward password protection for their records.

With the congress so woefully uninformed that they confuse password 
protection with cryptography and naive enough to believe that 1.9E6 
possibilities represents a serious roadblock to entry, it looks like we have 
a major education effort to perform.

It is interesting that there were no examples in this summary of crypto used 
for communications -- but that's completely consistent with what we've been 
hearing all along.

 - Carl


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