From: pmetzger@snark.shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger)
Subject: Re: Limits on the Use of Cryptography?
Organization: /usr/local/lib/news/organization
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 19:49:33 GMT

ritter@cactus.org (Terry Ritter) writes:
>
> Although the discussion of key registration has been interesting,
> it does seem a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.  Discussing the
> proposition on a computer network invokes an inherent bias in most
> readers.  So, suppose we give the issue a different environment:
>
>    The police bust an alleged child molester, and take possession
>    of his PC.  They believe that the hard drive contains a full
>    database of young kids who have been *or may be* assaulted.
>    That database is enciphered.
>
> Now, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to defend
> cryptography to ordinary voters, congress people and newspaper
> reporters.  You also need to explain to a relative of one of those
> kids, someone who doesn't own or work with a computer, why the
> government should "allow" private cryptography which could hide
> this sort of information.

Why stop there? Why not outlaw the computer itself? Obviously, without
the computer, no harm could have been done, right?

There is a key problem that the sensationalizers have -- they only
consider one half of a problem. They note that cryptography can be
used to aid in criminal activity -- they don't, however, look at the
benefits. Using the "only look at the harm" argument, I could showt
that steak knives should be outlawed -- after all, people get murdered
with steak knives.

Here is the thing: that child molester could have built an encryption
system on his own with a few hours work that the authorities could not
break -- just go out and buy a copy of Tannenbaum's book with full
source code to DES, for instance. He could have gone out and
downloaded an encryption program from a million places. He could have
failed to be so kind as to keep detailed records for the authorities
(presumably the cure to that is to make failure to record exact
details of your crimes a crime in itself -- Ms. Denning, take note,
here is your next proposal just waiting for you). A criminal isn't
going to care about anyone's petty little laws -- someone who is
already due the electric chair for getting his jollies by cooking
children won't give a damn that cryptography is illegal.

So, we are asked to weigh handing the government all the tools needed
to implement a totalitarian state against the possibility that the law
enforcement agencies might occassionally catch a stupid criminal
detered by the fact that the government has passed a law.

When will people learn that not everything can be fixed by a law, but
that much can be destroyed by one? No matter how optimistic the
lawmakers, passing a bill declaring that by next week all children
must be well fed and educated will not alter the minds or bellies of
the children across the nation. Passing a law tomorrow outlawing
racial hatred will not stop bigotry. You can't alter the universe with
laws. All you can do is give orders to police men with them. Those
policemen are people just like anyone else, with their limitations,
fears, and personal desires. No number of laws passed thus far have
stamped out drug dealing, or even made a dent in it, in spite of
budgets that have soared by one and a half orders of magnitude in a
decade. Similarly, no law banning cryptography will make the world
into the place you want. However, just as the drug laws have made the
inner cities into infernal nightmares of gunfire and street crime,
your anti-cryptography laws will have unintended consequences -- they
will not reduce crimes, but they may make our lives into nightmares in
ways we cannot even yet fathom. The obvious possibilities for a police
state are only the tip of the ice berg -- imagine the consequences of
a further erosion of the right to free speech and privacy in areas we
haven't even thought of yet.

You can't make the world into heaven by passing a law, but you can
often make it into hell with an ill considered one. Lets not confuse
our desires for what we would like a law to do with what its actual
consequences will be. Anticrypto legislation will do little or nothing
to stop crime. The only consequence I can see for it will be the
continuing expansion of the powers of government into our lives.
Anticrypto legislation will disable the capacity of ordinary citizens
to hide anything they do from the government. We might as well all
live in panopticons if we go ahead with such a scheme.


--
Perry Metzger		pmetzger@shearson.com
--
"They can have my RSA key when they pry it from my cold dead fingers."
Libertarian Party info: Phone 1-800-682-1776, E-Mail 345-5647@mcimail.com
Newsgroups: sci.crypt