British legislation to enforce encryption key disclosure

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Useless

First of all many forms of encryption are transient another words after the message is done the keys are lost having never been known to the users at all. Secondly how can you tell if the random static often found in any form of analog or complex digital text, image or sound data is really meaningful? Third and most importantly, clever people can always send one message and hide another within in it in things like the carrier message's keys, the encrypted text of the whole message, the images or sounds they send with it. So when they are asked for their keys by the investigators all they will get are innocent family pictures which explains the message being sent and not ever know what the real message is. Worse still what they keep failing to fully explain is that, as any expert can tell you, if the sender and recipient want to hide the fact they are sending hidden data the best you can ever get when looking at data like this is that it might mean something. Can you imagine being jailed because they think the photo you took in Iraq might contain hidden data? Even then with a large enough data sets like say a home movie they will not even have the computer power to form the mathematical maybe. To top it all off, even if they somehow prove you have a hidden message and demand the keys, it is possible to hide more than one message at the same time in the same data stream so depending on what key they give they will get a different messages. At this time there is no way to tell if this is what is happening so as you can see it would quickly become insane and lead to rampant abuses. We all know the criminals will use the forms least likely to be noticed while the average Joe public will be called on this all the time because they are not trying to hide anything they just want privacy. Another words this is misguided, arrogant, and ultimately stupid as it creates a false sense of security.

Posted by: alricsca   Posted on: 05/18/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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