Key escrow in the UK

[Simon Morris]

On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 11:11 +0100, Jeremiah Foster wrote:


> Not true. If you had a key recovery mechanism, you could quickly
> recovery the key and encrypted information, thus potentially saving
> lives. Look at the situation today, the police suspect another attack
> with innocent people killed is imminent, oughtn't there be a mechanism
> to prevent this needless death?

To me that last statement smacks of "think of the children".

Yes - we should be taking action against terrorists and preventing
needless deaths - how would key escrow help here?

Giving away our freedoms isn't necessarily going to help law enforcement
intercept communications. Other mechanisms exists to pass information
around and plan criminal activities - stenography for example.

To be honest one of the reasons that we managed to decrypt the Enigma
machine 60 years ago was because we captured a device and the German
operators were too confident in it's abilities. What if the terrorist
had a similar "low tech" method?

If I send a letter through the post I'm fairly sure it isn't read by law
enforcement officials... there are many different ways to communicate
and if the government start pushing for escrow here I'd be a bit
suspicious

~sm