Intuitive cryptography that's also practical and secure.

[Leichter, Jerry]

| > | 
| > | ...There's an obvious cryptographic solution, of course: publish the
| > | hash of any such documents.  Practically speaking, it's useless.
| > | Apart from having to explain hash functions to lawyers, judges,
| > | members of Congress, editorial page writers, bloggers, and talk
| > | show hosts,... 
| 
| > This is a common misconception.  The legal system does
| > not rely on lawyers, judges, members of Congress, and so on
| > understanding how technology or science works.  It doesn't rely on
| > them coming to accept the trustworthiness of the technology on any
| > basis a technologist would consider reasonable.  All it requires is
| > that they accept the authority of experts in the subject area, and
| > that those experts agree "strongly enough" that the mechanism is
| > sound.
| 
| I don't dispute your analysis.  However, this case is not just a legal
| one, it's a political issue, which is why I spoke of "editorial page
| writers, bloggers, and talk show hosts".  All it will take is for
| enough technically-skilled conspiracy theorists to raise the issue of
| hash function collisions and NSA, and we won't hear the end of it for
| decades to come.  
I doubt *anything* would eliminate the conspiracy theorists.  Intuitive
cryptography or otherwise, any convincing argument that the records
had *not* been tampered with would require careful examination - and
conspiracy theorists don't carefully examine evidence *against* their
positions.

|		    (Did you know that President Kennedy was actually
| killed by a large prime factor discovered by the CIA...?)
Actually, it's well known that aliens controlled both Lee Harvey Oswald
and Jack Ruby - their control over Ruby was slipping, he was about to go
public revealing what he know, so having Ruby kill Oswald did a great
job of covering up the ongoing invasion.

These aliens presented a take-it-or-leave it surrender document to
President Truman at Area 51 shortly after WW II.  Kennedy was about to
start an aggressive campaign against them - as, later was Robert
Kennedy, which is why the aliens arranged his death, too....

							-- Jerry :-)

(What was the name of the TV series a number of years back that was
built on this premise?  Not very good, but cleverly done.)

| 
| 
| 		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
| 
| 

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