| Last Cereal: Message Board: posting |
| Key Escrow (formerly frozen climate) |
| [5895] by "FrereKhan" (bowerbird.qut.edu.au) on Wed 19 Sep 2001 19:25:59 [ reply ] |
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I think this is a sideline issue: Being able to intercept and decode email is only useful if you know where to look in the first place. Also: key escrow is unimplementable, as far as I see it. The Public Key algos are widely available, as are free implementations of them. As soon as you prohibit something, the underground market finds another way. If email was seen to be entirely unsecure (given key escrow) then they would have found another way...
I think that short of having prior knowledge of the attack there would be no way to stop these people. Fervour is almost the so-called 'unstoppable force' in this situation. You cannot effectively combat people willing to kill themselves for their cause. So, key escrow: Legislating this would be a knee-jerk response, of course, but is this neccessarily bad? If you recall the Port Arthur situation here a few years ago, our government took the opportunity to illegalise most guns apart from pistols. There was of course some opposition, but on the whole I think people saw it as a good thing, in light of the situation in the States with handguns. I don't see encrypted email in the same light. Encrypted email is not capable of directly harming anyone, in the same way a gun can. In short: this situation is an intelligence issue. I don't see that plaintext email would have made an appreciable difference. Plaintext email in the future would not avert anything, unless there was prior intelligence knowledge of the people involved or their intent. FK. |