[1905] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Request for short policy papers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Gutmann)
Fri Nov 28 15:54:55 1997
From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
To: cryptography@c2.net
Cc: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
Reply-To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
X-Charge-To: pgut001
Date: Fri, 28 Nov 1997 14:50:04 (NZDT)
Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk> writes:
>Solveig Singleton wrote:
>>* I would also like to do a paper on the uses of encryption in combatting
>>human rights violations worldwide, again replete with examples and anecdotes...
>I'm not about to write a paper (no time), but in the early days of Apache-SSL,
>when I was none too sure about export regs in the UK (I'm still none too sure,
>but I don't export it), I was approached by several hospitals in various
>war-torn, blacklisted countries, who wanted to use it to share case histories
>with surgeons, etc., in the less war-torn world.
A few years ago when the situation in eastearn Europe was a lot worse than it
is now, I was contacted by a number of aid agencies and similar groups who
were using software I'd written or helped write (PGP and my SFS disk
encryption program) to protect information about refugees they were smuggling
out of the country (one person spent some time in prison because he refused to
hand over encryption keys to the local ethnic cleansing squad, who were also
the local police), and also to protect details of aid convoys to ensure they
wouldn't be intercepted and looted before they got to their destinations.
Because this sort of thing was quite sensitive, the people who provided me
with the information requested that I destroy any record of it, so I don't
have any details of names or places and don't want to go into any more detail
than this. Some of the work they did was covered by the media (mainly in the
countries where the refugees were resettled), but the role which encryption
played was again never mentioned because of its sensitivity.
It's interesting to note that SFS, which has internationalisation support, has
more versions in eastern European languages than all other languages combined
(Croation, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Russian, and others), which is
an indication of where it's appreciated most.
Peter.
