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Crypto Restrictions Are Taking Over the World

Posted by timothy on from the and-you'll-like-it dept.

zeke writes: "An article on SecurityFocus details how forced key escrow and other crypto restrictions have taken root around the world, in countries like France, South Africa, the Netherlands and the UK. Ironically, this leaves the United States -- the birthplace and graveyard of the Clipper Chip -- as one of the few bastions of unregulated encryption."

4 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We could argue the other side of the coin... by Ubi_UK · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You are completely missing the point

    'The terrorists' are the guys that have the finance to develop and use illegal-level encryption (it's not really the biggest crime they'll commit). Same goes for other big time criminals. They have more to lose with low encryption (which the police can read) than high encryption (which wiull just give them a $20 fine)

    Only small-time criminals with no resources and normal citicens will be forced to downgrade their encryption, making it easy for big brother to read their email....

  2. Something to bear in mind is tradition of Freedom by MemRaven · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Something that I think people should bear in mind in the article is that the tradition of Freedom allowed in countries which are currently making moves to restrict cryptographic freedoms is much lower than in the US, either with the consent of the governed or without. For example, while the author points to places like Burma and Russia as Bad Places that have serious cryptography restrictions, it also points out that places like France, the UK, the Netherlands, and South Africa also are looking at them, and after all, they don't seem like they have horrible military regimes, so what gives?

    Well, those countries don't have a history of providing their citizens with the almost absurd levels that the US does. In Britain, you don't have nearly the same rights that you do in the US, and while the Netherlands is a socially permissive country in many respects, it's also very tough on law and order for those things that it deems are social problems (just because in Amsterdam you can buy pot and sex doesn't mean you can kill someone in Utrecht). And South Africa has hardly had any history whatsoever of having solid personal freedoms. So while you can look at the problem pragmatically ("the US looked at the issues and realized that they're unworkable"), you can't just look at it from a US-civil-liberties perspective ("no one should be willing to give a government that much power").

    The problem, as the author correctly identifies, is that anything along the lines of key recovery is completely unworkable in practice at all. While it might look nice sitting in a piece of legislation, it's impossible to enforce. Cryptography isn't something like a gun, that's physically manufactured, it's a bunch of mathematical equations (remember the whole RSA on a T-Shirt campaign?). You can't stop the providers of something based on mathematics, and you can't force everybody in teh world to start keeping track of other people's keys, or else they'll just start using "illegal" encryption.

    And that's the real kicker: regardless of whether you want your citizens to have the power to encrypt things such that you can't have acccess to them, you can't stop them in any way. All you do by attempting is instantly incriminating a pretty significant portion of your population to access information that you can still get elsewhere (like keystroke loggers that the FBI uses to get passwords, or search warrants for hardware encryption devices, which are both pretty effective IMHO for key recovery purposes). You can't outlaw mathematics (the whole US issue highlighted that), so you really shouldn't try.

  3. Re:From the other side by gmack · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Lets think about that logically for a second...

    What exactly makes you think criminals and terrorists are going to hand over thier keys for escrow?

    I don't think this is an invasion of privacy so much as a complete waste of money and a source of unneeded complexity.

  4. Germany ... by 216pi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... supports strong encryption for it's fellow citizens and the industry and I count Germany to the developped countries...