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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:39 ADT
Mok-Kong Shen (mok-kong.shen@stud.uni-muenchen.de)
Mon, 20 Jul 1998 10:45:59 +0100
William H. Geiger III wrote:
> Look how they addressed cell phone security. Did they push for strong
> encrypted links? No they just made it illegal for anyone but themselves to
> snoop on the conversations. I expect nothing less from them on any other
> crypto related matter.
I want to repeat what I said previously elsewhere. Tapping telephones
is only effective against law-abiding citizens not their complement
(in set theoretic sense). One can use e.g. a foreign language to
communicate for which the tapping agency does not have agents that
understand it and for some languages there are dialects that even
natives could barely understand if not brought up under the dialects
concerned. (See e.g. the story in Kahn's book where the British
army used soldiers of foreign origin to transmit field commands in
WW II.) Further, one can used certain agreed upon terms (in the
sense of code book) to render the proper meaning of the messages
unintelligible or even simply some particular expressions (analogies,
illusions from proverbs, etc.) that are only comprehensible to
natives of the languages.
This shows that those regulating officials insisting on putting up
crypto laws are either unintelligent (which is less likely to be
the case) or are desirous to open up a way to pick up private
communications of harmless citizens (love affairs or what not)
to fulfill their personal abnormal psychological wishes or even
to make profits by channeling such informations to boulevard
newspapers.
M. K. Shen
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:39 ADT