Re: Denning's misleading statements

At 10:24 PM 1/26/96 -0500, Thomas Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>I think the big bait-and-switch is her description of the various 
>companies falling over themselves to get to _VOLUNTARY_ key escrow to 
>avoid losing data and protecting themselves against employee problems 
>versus _MANDATORY_GOVERNMENT_ key escrow to ensure that individuals 
>cannot hide information from the government.
>
>Key escrow is good.  Key escrow against your will is bad.

While I understand your point, I sorta hafta disagree.  (or, at least, state 
my reservations.)

If something is technologically IMPOSSIBLE (or, in practice, not available), 
it won't be mandated by government because it can't be.  The moment 
something exists, it can be forced on people.

I'm not saying we should somehow try to prevent people from developing truly 
voluntary key-escrow systems; rather, I'm saying that their existence should 
alert us to the danger.

On Fri, 26 Jan 1996, jim bell wrote:

> I'm not saying we should somehow try to prevent people from developing truly 
> voluntary key-escrow systems; rather, I'm saying that their existence should 
> alert us to the danger.

True - and while the administration/FBI and their pawns at NIST (most of 
which are ex-NSA) recognize they can't force total key escrow right now, 
they are working on a FIPS to ensure that all government software 
purchases include government key escrow, to try to tilt the marketplace 
towards this idea.  

>From the various Key Escrow meetings I've gone to, the main people who 
said they want voluntary escrow was mainly banking concerns, and they 
certainly wanted it in safe hands, not in the hands of the government.  
Infact no one from industry was concerned about "immediate key escrow" 
for tapping phone lines (except for this crazy guy from IBM).  Key escrow 
was only seen as useful in terms of data recovery.

-Thomas