From: John McCormac <jmcc@hackwatch.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 17:04:24 -0700 (PDT)
To: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>
Subject: Re: IE Frees Crypto
In-Reply-To: <199807022345.QAA07915@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <359C200A.C113F0BA@hackwatch.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Eric Murray wrote:
> 
> John McCormac writes:
> 
> [about Irish crypto legislation]
> 
> > <quote>
> >  In order to enable lawful access to encrypted data, legislation
> will
> > be enacted to oblige users of encryption products to release, in
> > response to a lawful authorisation, either plaintext which
> verifiably
> > relates to the encrypted data in question or the keys or algorithms
> > necessary to retrieve the plaintext. Appropriate sanctions will be
> put
> > in place in respect of failure to comply.
> > </quote>
> >
> > This seems to be carefully considered in that the user could be
> asked to
> > prove the encrypted document contains the encrypted form of the
> > plaintext. But the most important thing is that a search warrant
> would
> > be required to force the user to give up the plaintext or the key.
> 
> It says "lawful authorisation" not "search warrant".
> 
> That means that sometime later they can go back and
> pass another law that says that "lawful authorisation" for
> forcing one to reveal one's plaintext or keys is something
> much less stringent than a search warrant.
> Most proposed US crypto regulations have similar weasel-words.

Yep Eric,
I think that most people have jumped the gun here on this one. These are
not the actual regulations. They are only part of a framework proposal
so the eventual legislation could be lightyears removed from these
principles. (In fact given that most of the discussions between Ira
Magaziner and the Irish government were carried out in secret, I think
that the eventual legislation will be riddled with loopholes. Guess we
may have become the 51st state and we didn't even know. :-) ) The
problem is that most of the journos who wrote about it are relatively
clueless on the crypto aspect of things. There was some input from
Electronic Frontier Ireland  (Irish version of EFF) on the principles so
that is a good thing.


Regards...jmcc
-- 
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