Those who remember the Crypto Wars of the 1990s will recall all of the claims about "we won't be able to wiretap because of encryption". In that regard, this portion of the latest DoJ wiretap report is interesting:
Public Law 106-197 amended 18 U.S.C. 2519(2)(b) to require that reporting should reflect the number of wiretap applications granted for which encryption was encountered and whether such encryption prevented law enforcement officials from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted pursuant to the court orders. In 2006, no instances were reported of encryption encountered during any federal or state wiretap. The situation may be different for national security wiretaps, but of course that's where compliance with any US anti-crypto laws are least likely. There was no mention of national security or terrorism-related wiretaps in the report, possibly because they've all been done with FISA warrants. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]