Re: Why is cryptoanarchy irreversible?

At 5:13 PM 11/7/1996, Jim McCoy wrote:
> Getting a program to recognize a subliminal message channel is even
> harder than teaching a human to do so, check out the book Disappearing
> Cryptography or do a web search for "mimic functions" to see how easy it
> is to hide messages in text which a program parses as regular English.
> The other problem is that more and more of the data being tossed around
> the net are images and sound files in which it is incredibly easy to
> hide encrypted messages.

I doubt it is as easy as you say.  Truly noisy sources are unusual.
You don't have to be 100% sure you have a crypto-terrorist on your hands
to search their house, interrogate them, and talk for awhile to
everyone they know and then watch them carefully from then on.

You don't have to have very many convictions with life sentences
to discourage most experimenters which means that you can afford
to spend a lot of time and effort on those that you can find.

The perpetrator need only mess up once to be put in jail where he belongs.

Assuming that it is possible to identify most crypto-anarchist-terrorists
as suspects (possibly through informants or surveillance or tax audits)
it should be fairly simple to find their contraband disks and data when
you search their house.  The problem with executables is that they have
to execute so you can tell if they are encryption software.  How will
you handle this problem?

>> In the absence of strong cryptography, remailers do not offer much
>> anonymity.

> Except for the fact that US law stops at the US border (modulo kidnapping
> Mexican doctors or strongarming the rest of the world to obey US
> dictates...)  Information, on the other hand, is very easy to transport
> across national boundaries and such transmission is impossible to stop.
> With remailers outside the US I can send a message to a free nation and
> have it delivered to whomever I want.

Cross border transmissions of illegally encrypted information is as hard
to stop as the use of strong cryptography.  If you can stop, for the
most part, the use of strong cryptography, then you can stop the use
of foreign remailers, errrr, I mean espionage mailers.

Were there strong support for it, even cross border activity could be
significantly curtailed.  This would complicate the practice of carrying
stego'd materials across by hand.  That may seem improbable, but I know
that in the late 1960s the Johnson Administration seriously considered
limiting U.S. tourism because of the negative impact it had on the dollar.

In the model I am positing, there would be broad popular support for
such policies.

Peter Hendrickson
ph@netcom.com

At 5:55 PM -0800 11/7/96, Peter Hendrickson wrote:
>At 5:13 PM 11/7/1996, Jim McCoy wrote:
>> Getting a program to recognize a subliminal message channel is even
>> harder than teaching a human to do so, check out the book Disappearing
>> Cryptography or do a web search for "mimic functions" to see how easy it
>> is to hide messages in text which a program parses as regular English.
>> The other problem is that more and more of the data being tossed around
>> the net are images and sound files in which it is incredibly easy to
>> hide encrypted messages.
>
>I doubt it is as easy as you say.  Truly noisy sources are unusual.
>You don't have to be 100% sure you have a crypto-terrorist on your hands
>to search their house, interrogate them, and talk for awhile to
>everyone they know and then watch them carefully from then on.

"Truly noisy sources" are not at all unusual. Actually, the hard part is
ever proving a source is _not_ noisy. (There are deep issues involving
randomness here, and I usually go into the work of Kolmogorov, Chaitin, and
others at this point. Consult the archives, or see a book on information
theory.)

As Jim noted, any reasonably good crypto algorithm will produce an output
which so closely resmbles noise (modulo the issue of "Begin PGP" tags,
which can, and should, be removed) as to foil any efforts to prove it is
not noise.

The legal issue is this: can we pass laws and have them upheld by the
courts which impose severe penalties on people for the supposed crime of
having in their possession sequences of numbers which cannot be converted
to meaningful English sentences? I maintain that the Constitution says we
cannot. Of course, if the Constitution is thrown out, then the old
Cypherpunk joke may come into play: "Use a random number, go to jail." (An
Eric Hughes quote, from 1992-3.)


>In the model I am positing, there would be broad popular support for
>such policies.

I think you are assuming a lot.

--Tim May

"The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM
that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology."
[NYT, 1996-10-02]
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."