[3144] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Top Pentagon official declares no one has a right to secrecy.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arnold G. Reinhold)
Wed Aug 5 13:10:51 1998
In-Reply-To: <35C7541E.B2AAF6BF@mot.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 11:26:37 -0400
To: Andrew Meredith <meredith@mot.com>, cryptography@c2.net
From: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>
At 7:34 PM +0100 8/4/98, Andrew Meredith wrote:
>Deputy Secretary of Defense John J. Hamre said:
...
>> You know, it's creating the infrastructure for a security
>> environment that that encryption rides on.
>
>What does this actually mean?
>
>You got email ? .. you got PGP ? .. you got strong crypto! If it really
>is strong crypto you can send it over anything you like. You can laser
>write it on the moon for that matter !
>
>> That turns out to be much more demanding than you think.
>
>I might think that if I knew what he meant :)
>
I think what Hambre and FBI Director Freeh really fear is universal strong
encryption, where almost everyone's e-mail and even phone calls are
strongly encrypted just because they have Windows 2002 installed. Doing
that requires a public key infrastructure and that is not so easy to build.
So they feel they still have time to influence how it is designed.
>> you just can't set up PGP between you and somebody else.
Without some special effort. But I don't think Hambre understands just how
easy it is, especially for bad guys, who have always been sensitive to
issues of establishing trust.
>> And if you do, it's a good thing to look at.
I think he means that they can get valuable intellegence just from the fact
that two people are exchanging encrypted messages. Since so few people
encrypt now, they can afford to scrutinize those that do.
Arnold Reinhold
Got crypto? http://ciphersaber.gurus.com
