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Encryption Security

UK Government dropping Key Escrow? 57

Posted by Hemos from the please-please-please dept.
Crazyscot writes "The UK Department of Trade and Industry have released a consultation paper suggesting they are willing to drop their proposals for key escrow. However, the BBC coverage of the story warns that if no alternative is found within three weeks, the escrow proposals may be revived. " I think a great alternative would be giving it to Rob and I. Yeah.
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UK Government dropping Key Escrow? More

UK Government dropping Key Escrow?

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  • Agreed. This one was thought up by a bunch of extremely dull nineteenth century grammarians who thought that as the infinitive is not splittable in Latin (it's a single word), it shouldn't be splittable in English. Tossers.


    Nick

  • I don't mind if the government reads my email, but only if they delete all the spam while they are at it!

    Think of it as a value added service.

    Steve

  • I agree. I think the infinitive splitting rule is as stupid as the "Don't end a sentence with a preposition" rule. As that swell fellow Winston Churchill said, "This is a rule up with which I will not put!"
  • I've been using the international version of PGP for years. Yet, I've never been to the United States. Does this tell you anything about how effective banning cryptography/making key escrow compulsory, would be?

    Criminals won't need to resort to stenography or anything else - they'll just use whatever the fuck they like. And if they haven't got the technical know-how, they'll hire some wannabe hacker kiddies to do it for them. And if you think that's fantasy, think again - it's already happening.

    Personally, I laugh in the face of any government, British, American or anything else, which tries to deny me the right or the ability to do whatever the fuck I like when it comes to computers.

    Dodge
  • But it would be imperative that you be proficient in its usage...

    :-)

  • This is just plain wrong. It's also idiotic. The criminals won't play by the rules, and they'd have a very nice target to shoot at, this lovely warehouse of all these keys...
  • sed -e 's/international/US//'

    Okay, so it's Friday afternoon and I've been drinking beer and Red Bull w/ vodka...

    Sue me.

    D.
  • It's an invasion of privacy, plain and simple. It doesn't matter whether I'm encrypting or compressing 48 megs of plans to assasinate the President or goat porn, if I don't want you to see it, you should be able to make me.
    Oh, and becuase I know that big bro is watching, here are some more flag words for the government spiders to catch:
    bomb, terrorist, assasination, spy, encryption, communist, socialist, facist, nazi, etc..etc..etc

    -davek

  • If you live in the UK you can do something about these ridiculously boneheaded proposals (`duh, if we can't think of anything we'll, er, um, we'll just take the stupidest option...') -- register at stand.org.uk [stand.org.uk] and prepare to lobby your MP. If it's good enough for Alan Cox [linux.org] surely it's good enough for you?


    --
    W.A.S.T.E.
  • Yes I'm shouting. People don't notice after loads of comments otherwise :-)

    We all remember /those/ days.

    Let's daub the web black again. Not against UK Escrow, not against US Escrow. But to remind people not to forget our privacy - that the legislative threats continue.

    Maybe FSF and EFF could get together on this one, so that free software got a bit of publicity in the bargain.

    Or maybe someone else has an idea.

  • It is the police and customs that want key escrow, not GCHQ. If GCHQ want your private key, they just send the g-men round to take it off your hard drive- either physically or electronically.

    Put it this way, if GCHQ wanted your private key, a) they wouldn't need a law to be passed to do get it and b) you'd never know.

    Remember, you don't need A-levels or a degree to join the police, but you do to join GCHQ.

    Living near Cheltenham I hear this *so* often from people who work at GCHQ. They're tired of being represented as wanting key escrow. It's crap. They have enough Men In Black, enough survellience kit and enough processing power to hack *anything*. Police and customs are the fuckwits.

    The best way to crack a secret code is to be there at the time and place of encryption/decryption, not to intercept it half way through. Jeez, get a life, amateurs...

  • Stand is a good thing, and (thus far) my participation has placed no severe demands on my time. I urge UK readers to join it.

    http://www.stand.org.uk/

    Chris
  • Damn all this makes me want to buy a small(er) island, proclaim it as a my own nation and make everything legal that's fun and everything fun that's legal. Anyone join me?

    While I'd like to question your prerequisites (buying an island and proclaiming it independent), there is a lot to be done about alternative law.

    In a hypothetical world (say, a computer game), you can establish any laws you like and try them out theoretically. Want to legalize murder? Try it out in cyberspace where nobody is actually hurt. Does law enforcement regularly intervene in theatre plays to catch people playing thiefs and hooligans? Hardly.

    In the same fashion, you can establish fictious laws about information processing, transfer some information from the real world into cyberspace, process it according to the laws in the game, and transfer the result back out into the real world. Now, who could claim a crime has been committed?

    All you need is software and a little imagination. No islands.

  • Does anyone have any good techniques for recognizing encrypted data? I've done a little bit of poking, and it seems to me that there's no reliable way to distinguish between encrypted and compressed data. However, I have hope that their might be some theorem that any compressed data must carry a certain amount of redundancy to be uncompressed -- like enough information to initialize the dictionary, etc.
  • Use the idle cycles of all government computers to crack everyone's encryption by using a "distributed" client or something. Then the criminals won't be able to opt out by ignoring the law like they already are.

    Or just rely on traditional intelligence, which seems to work well enough most of the time.
  • I'm sorry, I hate split infinitives.

    They may be proper, but I still consider them poor form.

    "That is a rule with which I shall not put up" is the proper form of Churchill's basterdization, and not what he proposes. Though it is amazing how prevelant split infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions has become.
  • I want to know who these criminals are so dangerous that it is worth implementing an extremely expensive key recovery system, but too stupid to get around the law by using stenography, or spoofing an account and using strong crypto anyway, or any of a number of other obvious ways around these silly laws.

  • Yeah. I like that last quote. Good for a sig as well.
  • In a report yesterday on a leak of today's offical report, I saw something about instead requiring ISPs to log all traffic, keeping everything for a week (that could be terabytes of data), and also alert the government if they detect encrypted traffic. Is there any news of that, or was that part of what was rejected?

    I hope I was just misreading it.
  • Thanks!

    Grammar posts only work if they are high up on the list. Grammar posts are also very important.

    I hear people complaining that HTML is being degraded by things like MS Frontpage, and they get all upset about it. MS people foolishly say "But hey, it shows up OK in the browser, so who cares if it is correct". Wise /. folk know that there is much more to it than that, and they know that it is important to code (markup..) neatly and correctly.

    The same is true of the English language. Yes, if you are ungrammatical, 99.8% of the time everyone will know what you mean. But bit by bit, the more subtle forms of expression degrade and become unuseable because people aren't used to parsing them. Slowly, English becomes less useful.

    The good news is that new grammatical structures can and do get created to replace the degrading ones. However, that's not an _excuse_ to be lax about grammer. If you don't like subjunctives don't use them - but check to see if you have something better to replace them with...


  • Don't let the illiterate "embrace and extend" English.

    Don't let Microsoft "embrace and extend" HTML/open standards... :-)

  • I can spell! I might develop Internet systems daytime (and night of course) but my degree is in English.

    Yeah. That's why I dig that vibe.

  • I've been watching the RC5-64 project at www.distributed.net for quite a while. I wonder what the Feds would do if we ALL sent in every possible key that we might use for the key bank? Gee, I've got 68,719,476,736 keys I would like to register with you. I think it might, infact, get the point across that even if you had the keys, if people want something private they'd just use a diffrent key. This seems to be an inverse of the refund day - we can have a key submission day. I imagine we'd get more press.
  • To go boldly where no man has gone before... J

  • Being as they are a government agency, someone has already paid or will pay for it no matter what. The point is to flood them with keys so its grossly impracticle to keep the keys... If it costs me $20 to make a point about my or your privicy - as vague as that concept is at this point, I'm willing to do it. 'Cides this is the UK Government - I'll send them keys from the US and they can bill me. *chuckle*
  • Three weeks to show an alternative? That's not exactly a lot. Her Majesty's Government has been thinking and stumbling and pondering about this plan for about five years now. This is obviously a half hearted attempt to pacify some of the media. In three weeks' time nothing deemed viable will have been submitted and hey key escrow goes ahead. But we'll have had our chance.

    Odd that policy has changed due to "industrial concerns" about the "electronic commerce", ie the economy, not due to problems with the individual who presumably doesn't mind telling everyone he knows just how often he picks his nose. Those that do object to this, must be emailing their partners in crime details of the next shipment of high-explosive cocaine. Otherwise they wouldn't have anything to hide, would they? We're not all like that.

    Even the moderate anarchist would have a hard time because he has encrypted his email. Let's suppose he was caught alledgedly shoplifting an easter egg - police would investigate and discover that he's been encrypting emails. This gets mentioned in court as proof of his bad character and he goes to prison for twenty years.

    I don't particularly care what sort of solution industry finds for itself. I just want to go about my business of being a pinko-hippie liberal communist/generic anarchist and bring down the evil institutions of Microsoft and capitalism without being spied upon by HM goverment and Sainsbury's for the so-called benefit of my more conventional neighbours.

    The best way to confuse spies is to flood them with useless information - yes that's right, send your dog an email every five minutes, put in some naughty words there like sex, drugs and rock'n'roll and watch their automators go beserk. Of course the real message would be in World War I type code: "Send three n fourpence, we're going for a dance" might really mean "Send reinforcements - we're going to advance"

    Damn all this makes me want to buy a small(er) island, proclaim it as a my own nation and make everything legal that's fun and everything fun that's legal. Anyone join me?


    ---
    To learn more about paranoids, just follow them around.

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