anonymous services

[Kurt Granroth]

On Friday 14 September 2001 03:43 pm, Eric wrote:
> True, but would corporations that sell crypto ignore laws?

To be complete, this question should be "True, but would AMERICAN 
corporations that sell crypto ignore laws".  The answer to that is "no", of 
course,

The fact that you equated "corporations" and "American corporations" as one 
and the same is hardly unique.  The fact that these stricter crypto laws are 
even being discussed is proof of that.  We are raised in our culture to 
believe that the world revolves around and follows *us*.

This is simply not true.

Let's look at it from this point of view.  Say you are in the US State Dept 
and want to send sensitive information to somebody else.  You will want to 
encrypt it.. but lo and behold, the only encryption available was produced in 
Germany with a backdoor that the German government could use anytime they 
wanted.  Would you be willing to use this encryption?

Of course not!  Information is encrypted in the first place because you want 
only the intended eyes to view it.  There is no possible way that any person 
in the US government would encrypt state secrets using encryption that any 
other country, "friendly" or not, is able to view.

So now lets flip the view.  The US passes a law that makes *all* cryptography 
have a backdoor that the NSA and FBI can use to decrypt any message.  Now you 
are in the German government... would you use this crypto?  Again, there is 
no possible way.

This is hardly idle speculation, either.  The German parliment is seriously 
considering moving to all Open Source software *mostly* because they are 
convinced that Microsoft has backdoors built into their software.

This all means that if the US passes a law mandating crypto backdoors, then 
the only people, corporations, or governments that will use it will be 
American.  All other countries and people would develop and use strong crypto 
that *didn't* have the backdoor.

Now say you are a terrorist or criminal.  In the global community, you have 
access to either strong crypto from "overseas" or broken crypto from the US.  
Which would you use?

Really, I can understand and sympathise with the US lawmen on their inability 
to view encrypted messages... but until the US rules the world, any law of 
that sort will only hurt law-abiding people while doing NOTHING to law-
breaking ones.
-- 
Kurt Granroth            | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
granroth@kde.org         | granroth@suse.com
            KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop