Reply From: "Anthony J. Bettini" <tony@cs.umb.edu>
> Date: Sun, 7 Jun 1998 16:16:45 -0600 (MDT)
> From: mea culpa <jericho@dimensional.com>
> To: InfoSec News <isn@sekurity.org>
> Subject: [ISN] Infowar, More Hype Than Reality?
>
> "Information warfare seems to be a marketing exercise rather
> than anything else. It's the computer security community trying
> to increase sales to the (U.S.) federal government," he said.
>
> He believes that government plans to seek "mandatory key escrow"
> in the name of protection against computer crime was a sneaky way
> of imposing control over citizens' privacy.
>
Information warfare is very real. Whitfield Diffie, a strong
opponent of key escrow specifically mentioned the reality and harms of the
future of information warfare when he spoke at MIT in April regarding his newly
published book, Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and
Encryption.
Along the same lines, when Bruce Scheinder spoke at Beyond Hope
about cryptography he warned of cyber-terrorists using jurisdiction
shopping as a means towards warfare.
> "Mandatory key escrow" means that citizens protecting their
> electronic business with encrypted computer code would have to
> provide government regulators with keys to that code.
Granted I am not a supported of key escrow by any means mind you
however, when FBI Agent Smith (if I recall correctly Director of Digital
Telephony Division) spoke at the same MIT special aired on CSPAN in support
of key escrow, he stated that it was not the so called "government regulators"
that would hold the "keys to that code" but a neutral trusted third party
such as a bank.
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-o-
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Received on Tue Jun 9 12:37:03 1998