The Demise of the Trusted Third Party Fallacy

[M.R.]

 >From the New York Times, word that the Obama administration wants
 >to compel access to encrypted communications.

 >http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html
...

I expect this law to be, overall, counterproductive.

 From the information given in the NYT article, I conclude that
the law might well be called "The Demise of the Trusted Third
Party Fallacy".

(Another excerpt from NYT article):

  "Even with such a law, some gaps could remain. It is not clear how
  it could compel compliance by overseas services that do no domestic
  business, or from a “freeware” application developed by volunteers..."

Hushmail case demonstrated that the US actually could compel some
(many? all?) legal entities outside of its borders to comply; but
it is quite unlikely that peer-to-peer ~applications~, operating
entirely independent from any third party, could be effectively
subverted or eradicated.

I would therefore expect increased preference for such applications,
specifically among those that have the greatest motivation to secure
their communications from those that desire such law in order to make
their work easier. After all, when it becomes not just suspected, but
generally assumed that any third party will cooperate with your
adversary, crypto solutions that assume the existence of a "trusted
third party" will be in due course replaced by those that do not.

Marko R.

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