Cryptophone

Where is the cryptophone project? I haven't seen anything about it for a
while. Last I read, a company had a commercial triple-DES product with no
public key - has anyone seen this? How is the sound quality? The cryptophone
is the best way to drive a stake through the heart of Clipper.

Suppose someone writes a crypto program and gives it to some friends. One of
the friends uploads it to a BBS. Someone calls up from a foreign country and
downloads it from the BBS. Who is at fault? The person who wrote it, for not
retaining control over his product? The friend who uploaded it, for placing
it where a foreigner could access it? The operator of the BBS, for not
screening the file and preventing the foreigner from downloading it? Or the
foreigner himself, who is probably out of range of U.S. law in any case?

Suppose someone writes a crypto program and makes it generally available to
anyone who wants it. It goes out of the country, but there is no way to know
who sent it out of the country or how. Can they prosecute the person who
wrote it for not maintaining control over it? If they can, this means, among
other things, that selling the Norton Utilities to someone without checking
to see that they are a citizen is illegal, and that having PKZIP on your BBS
is illegal. If the precedent gets established that the person who writes
such a program is responsible for keeping it out of the hands of foreigners,
that would be a big problem. All crypto would have to be published
anonymously, because nobody could risk signing their name to it.
This must not happen!

The flamewar going on here is counterproductive; they must be laughing down
at the fort.              --- MikeIngle@delphi.com

Mike Ingle says:
> Where is the cryptophone project?

There is no one such project. There are several of them that I know
of. If you think its an interesting thing to do, I strongly encourage
working on it on your own -- its not the sort of thing that requires
lots of people working on it, but it is the sort of thing that more
people talk about than do.

> I haven't seen anything about it for a while. Last I read, a company
> had a commercial triple-DES product with no public key - has anyone
> seen this? How is the sound quality? The cryptophone is the best way
> to drive a stake through the heart of Clipper.

I fully agree.

Recent developments have been interesting on other fronts. 24kbps and
28kbps modems have arrived on the market, albeit at high prices. When
the final V.Fast standard comes in, 28kbps modems should cost only a
few hundred dollars. Although ordinary workstations can't do CELP fast
enough, GSM appears to be easily workable even on "normal" computers.

> Suppose someone writes a crypto program and gives it to some friends. One of
> the friends uploads it to a BBS. Someone calls up from a foreign country and
> downloads it from the BBS. Who is at fault? The person who wrote it, for not
> retaining control over his product? The friend who uploaded it, for placing
> it where a foreigner could access it? The operator of the BBS, for not
> screening the file and preventing the foreigner from downloading it? Or the
> foreigner himself, who is probably out of range of U.S. law in any case?

There is no case law or statute on this. The folks writing the laws
didn't understand computers and had no notion of the fact that it was
possible for someone physically outside the country to access
information physically inside the country. With luck, the case will
simply be overturned, and there may never be any case law defining
this silly form of "export".

Perry