> THE TRUTH ABOUT ENCRYPTION > Cambridge University cryptography expert Ross Anderson says governments' > efforts to keep encryption technology out of the hands of criminals and > terrorists is misguided: "If I were to hold a three-hour encrypted > conversation with someone in the Medellin drug cartel, it would be a dead > giveaway. In routine monitoring, GCHQ (Britain's signals intelligence > service) would pick up the fact that there was encrypted traffic and would > instantly mark down my phone as being suspect. Quite possibly the police > would then send in the burglars to put microphones in all over my house. In > circumstances like this, encryption does not increase your security. It > immediately and rapidly decreases it. You are mad to use encryption if you > are a villain." (New Scientist 6 Nov 99) > http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19991106/confidenti.html This is total bullshit, or at best it is a highly limited and short- sighted view. Once encryption becomes more widely used there will be no such red flags going up just because someone wants to speak to their cousin in Colombia in privacy. (Not to mention that with internet phones going through mixing nets there will be no way even to know who is talking to whom.) Ross Anderson is arguing that we should not put restrictions on encryption because using it makes you stand out as someone who has something to hide. But the only way to make sure that stays the case is to put as many restrictions as possible on encryption! If we listen to him and make encryption freely available to everyone, his argument no longer works. Hence, in effect, his argument can be twisted to support more restrictions on access to encryption, rather than less. It is misguided and counter- productive to argue along these lines.
