[2395] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Rivest's Wheat & Chaff - A crypto alternative
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Wagner)
Mon Mar 30 15:45:44 1998
From: David Wagner <daw@cs.berkeley.edu>
To: rsmith@securecomputing.com
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 12:28:53 -0800 (PST)
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <v03007803b145a486e1b9@[172.17.1.150]> from "Rick Smith" at Mar 30, 98 02:01:29 pm
> >But here's one you might not have heard before: cellphone privacy.
>
> There is exactly *one* celebrated case in which a breach of cell phone
> privacy caused something akin to "damage," and that was the Newt Gingrich
> case. Do we know of any others?
Analog cellphone eavesdropping was old news by the time of the Gingrich
incident. See e.g. the infamous Princess Di intercepts, which preceeded
Gingrich by a substantial margin. I vaguely remember a another case or
two reported in the press of lower-profile Representatives snooped upon.
(On a related note, there was the Clinton pager transcripts story, too.)
But to ask about celebrated cases is missing the point. The danger isn't
the part of the iceberg that you can see; it's the part you can't see.
And the celebrity cases aren't the common case; the common case is that
your privacy is breached, and you don't even know it.
This stuff really is quite intangible. That's why it's up to us engineers
to get it right. The public doesn't want to know about the details; they
just trust us to "do the right thing". (Like bridge-building. The public
doesn't want to know about stress factors and so on: just build it strong
enough to stay up, they'll say, and don't bother me.)
> My wife is an MD and she's *constantly* discussing patients' private
> affairs over her cell phone. The nice thing about the way the law is
> written is that it doesn't penalize speaker for disclosing the intercepted
> information, it makes the listener liable for prosecution instead. The
> structure of the law doesn't encourage strong privacy. Instead, it promotes
> vulnerable use of cell phones by shifting the blame if information is
> disclosed.
Of course. This is far more convenient for the cellphone industry. That's
why they've lobbied for laws which are structured that way, and they've been
the most potent voice during the creation of most of these regulations...
