At 3:33 AM -0700 1999-10-24, Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:
>I have long doubted the very premise that encrypted communications
>are a asset to criminals and a threat to law enforcement. The
>standard way LE penetrates criminal organizations is to work from the
>bottom. Someone at the retail level is caught and pressured to
>cooperate. He implicates a superior, and so on.
>
>Remember that encrypted messages from the superior to the cooperating
>underling are sent using the underling's private key. Providing that
>key to LE is in many ways less risky to the underling than other
>forms of cooperation. The key need only be provided once and then the
>is no need for further meeting with agents. Only a few people in LE
>need to know where the key comes, reducing the risk of leaks and
>making them easier to trace..
>
>Once they have that key, LE gets both an ongoing clear stream of
>communications and evidence that is much more damming in court than
>the traditional hard to hear and obscurely worded wire tap recording.
>And if encryption get criminals to communicate more, it could be a
>boon to law enforcement.
Damning in court?
How can provenance (origin, history) of the damning message be proved?
If Alice and Bob communicate with PK and remailers, as will be expected,
how can anything be proved? Sure, if "Pablo Escobar" publishes his public
key and signs his messages to "Joe Underling," this may be damning in a
court trial.
But this scenario is unlikely in the extreme.
Were I a felon, as I am, I'd surely take crypto and remailers over the
alternative of no crypto and no remailers.
--Tim May
Y2K: It's not the odds, it's the stakes.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
