dejavu, Re: Hijackers' e-mails were unencrypted

[Jay D. Dyson]

On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Ed Gerck wrote:

> With all due respect to the need to vent our fears, may I remind this
> list that we have all seen this before (that is, governments trying to
> control crypto), from key-escrow to GAK, and we all know that it will
> not work -- and for many reasons.  A main one IMO is that it is simply
> impossible to prevent anyone from sending an encrypted message to anyone
> else except by controlling the receivers and the transmitters (as done
> in WWII, for example).

	Like you, I once believed that our government would follow
sensible courses of action with respect to technology.  That time has
passed.

	The advent of DMCA should have served as a wake-up call to the
reality that our government no longer even operates under the *pretense*
of sanity or rationality with respect to technology laws. 

	Now, on the heels of DMCA (which has criminalized many of the
tools and technologies upon which we in the security industry rely) comes
the SSSCA at the behest of Senator Hollings.  Frying Pan -> Fire.

	We can no longer assume that our elected representatives are
acting on behalf of our interests in these matters.  They have not before,
are not now, and are increasingly unlikely to in the future.

	And anyone who dares to insist that I'm being alarmist can go
reverse engineer the latest commercial "security solution," publish the
results, and see just how "free" they remain.

-Jay

  (    (                                                         _______
  ))   ))   .-"There's always time for a good cup of coffee."-.   >====<--.
C|~~|C|~~| (>------ Jay D. Dyson - jdyson at treachery.net ------<) |    = |-'
 `--' `--'  `--------------- rm -rf /bin/laden ---------------'  `------'





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