[Cryptography] Cryptography for consensual sex in California ?

Jerry Leichter leichter at lrw.com
Thu Oct 2 12:04:38 EDT 2014


On Sep 30, 2014, at 9:49 PM, ianG <iang at iang.org> wrote:
> In my threat model, we are faced with intimate aggression delivered over
> an IM/chat channel.  So we've decided to add a mode that BCC's the
> messages encrypted to an arbitrator.  If a person is unsure about the
> situation, then she can hit the BCC button and carry on.  If/when a
> dispute arises on any question, the transcript can be pulled out,
> decrypted and become part of the evidence for fact finding.
Phone companies have done this (in a limited way) for years:  If you are faced with a harassing phone call, you hang up and enter some key sequence. Information about the caller is saved at the phone company, which will make it available only to internal investigators or the police, and only at your request.  In the past, they'd sometimes require you to sign an agreement to prosecute before they'd give you the information.

This pre-dates CallerID, and the information saved is typically not blockable by the caller.  (These days, with the wide use of private PBX's and VoIP, it's probably no longer all that useful against anyone but dumb callers.)

Since CallerID has made the identification of the caller almost universally available, the old "privacy" arguments that drove the design are mainly irrelevant today.  In fact, the whole mechanism is probably more or less obsolete.  I'm not sure if it's even offered any more.

                                                        -- Jerry

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