Several people (Carl Ellison?, others) have suggested over the years of the key escrow debate that if the government wants a voluntary key escrow system all they have to do is publish a public key, and anyone wanting to use it can Cc them. A good source of a public key we know is the NSA's public key is the one buried in Lotus notes 'differential crypto' partial key escrow mechanism (24 bits of 64 are escrowed). Andrew do you have the modulus & public exponent in hex? I am thinking we could take the NSA's key from windows and format it as a PGP public key. As a 2nd issue in doing this -- what email address would one put on the NSA's PGP public key? Suggestions? Big Brother <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>? You need the email address to Cc or Bcc the NSA with. I guess even a non working email address would do -- they'll read it anyway with ECHELON, and probably feel duty bound to decrypt it. A disadvantage of doing this with the Microsoft NSA key over the Lotus one is that we know for a fact that the Lotus one is the NSA's; whereas there is some doubt (though in my opinion a rather small doubt) that this is NSA's key. Anyway, if people started encrypted messages to the NSA with it, the NSA would probably obtain it from Microsoft one way or another. The political value of publishing an NSA public key is probably lower now than earlier in the key escrow / GAK debate, because for quite some time the US government was sticking to the line that it would be strictly voluntary -- more lately this has been less emphasied, and key escrow itself as a government proposal is probably relatively dead right now. Adam
