[Cryptography] Plan to End the Crypto War

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

Is this really intended to be a proposal to end the crypto wars or is
his real purpose to demonstrate that the demands of Comey et al. are
not actually achievable because they are not even consistent.

First off, is there the slightest possibility that the Internet could
use a networking technology that is effectively Tor on steroids
privacy wise and telegraph era latency wise? I don't see how anyone is
going to tolerate that type of overhead unless they are up to no good.
Certainly not for anything other than asynchronous messaging like
email, maybe some document exchange.

It isn't difficult to come up with similar schemes. The ingenuity here
is the nature of the exceptional access mechanism.


But is the exceptional access really going to satisfy the FBI? They
demand access to the communications without any form of
accountability. That is why National Security Letters exist. Though
the idea that a government agency could issue such a demand without it
being a search is ridiculous. As is the notion that a government
agency can prohibit discussion of the demand without it being a breach
of the first amendment. The whole point of the constitution was to
fetter the executive so that they could not engage in either activity
without the express permission of the courts.

For historical reasons, the FBI is both the national police force and
an intelligence service and the NSA is a military organization. Both
situations are anomalous as far as I am concerned. MI5 and MI6 always
reported into the Cabinet Office except when there was a War Office.
Special branch acted at the direction of the Secret Service but the
Secret Service never exercised police powers.

The problem with the current situation is that there is effectively no
firewall between the civil police power and the military. The FBI has
been using the military to perform pervasive surveillance and then
laundered the evidence so as to conceal the source when bringing
prosecutions. Why does this matter? Well lets play family fortunes,
what word most commonly occurs before the word 'coup'?


Chaum's system purports to divide up responsibility between n parties
but the government has the ability to coerce all n parties. So from a
cryptographic point of view these are n independent agents but from
the social point of view there is only one. And given the willingness
of former FBI director Louis Freeh to engage in a Constitutional Coup
against Bill Clinton, assisting Kenneth Starr in the construction of a
perjury trap intended to bring about the impeachment and conviction of
President Clinton, this is not a power I am willing to confer to the
FBI. Freeh's attempted coup was only 17 years ago. This is recent
history.

And of course it is no little irony that his motivation was revenge on
Clinton for blocking Freeh's anti-crypto agenda. One of the many
things that we discovered in the wake of 9/11 was just how incompetent
and ignorant Freeh had been. He had been so desperate to collect
information he was utterly unaware of and totally neglected the
ability to analyze it.