2002 US Wiretap Report

Posted by michael on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @06:28AM from the STU-III dept.

GMontag writes "Full report:2002 WIRETAP REPORT Administrative Office of the United States Courts Leonidas Ralph Mecham, Director I especially like this part: 'Public Law 106-197 amended 18 U.S.C. 2519(2)(b) to require that reporting should reflect the number of wiretap applications granted for which encryption was encountered and whether such encryption prevented law enforcement officials from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted pursuant to the court orders. Encryption was reported to have been encountered in 16 wiretaps terminated in 2002 and in 18 wiretaps terminated in calendar year 2001 or earlier but reported for the first time in 2002; however, in none of these cases was encryption reported to have prevented law enforcement officials from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted.'"

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chaffing and winnowing by stdarg · 2003-04-30 07:20 · Score: 5, Interesting

Has anybody read about chaffing and winnowing? (http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/chaffing.txt) What is its strength compared to normal encryption?

Anyway, the reason I was wondering is all the comments about extracting passwords from people. What would happen if something were encrypted in a way that different passwords revealed different content? It would be trivial with chaffing and winnowing, but I'm sure it could work with other types of encryption.

The key idea is that of plausible deniability. Say you interleave three streams of data: the real stuff, the decoy stuff, and some random garbage to mess with messages sizes. If you can give 'them' the password for the decoy stuff, and it works, aren't you pretty much off the hook?