[1280] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Wayner op-ed in today's NYTimes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Gutmann)
Tue Jul 29 22:11:02 1997
From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
To: karn@qualcomm.com
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
Reply-To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
X-Charge-To: pgut001
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 13:54:10 (NZST)
>Another essay that really needs to be written is how there really is no such
>thing as the "status quo" that law enforcement keeps talking about maintaining.
That's an argument which I've been trying to use here, with mixed results. A
more generic form (for countries which didn't have revolutions :-) is that the
status quo for millenia was that it was possible to have completely private
conversations (just walk into the middle of a field and talk queitly with the
other party), it's merely an accident of technology in the last 50 years or so
that it's possible to have pretty much universal monitoring of communictions.
It's crypto which is *restoring* the status quo, not the other way around.
The standard counterargument to this is that we're now dealing with more
sophisticated criminals/drug dealers/pedophiles (which are of course a recent
phenomenon, they didn't exist until the Internet was created for them)/etc,
and therefore we need a bigger hammer.
The status quo argument is a useful mechanism for deflating the "we need
wiretaps" cheerleaders, but I don't know if it'll win too many converts - it's
mainly an academic point which is easily squashed if you shout "pedophiles"
and "drug dealers" loudly enough.
Peter.
