re the secret source of that announcement in c x xs ef lerami lerctr org merlin lerami lerctr org david hayes writes ok andrew i ll provide some evidence a friend of mine worked for an electronics manufacturer on with a west coast office they routinely sold equipment to the japanese one day the japanese started showing up with discount demands that were amazingly close to the cost to manufacture the products this company routinely sent most of the manufacturing data to the field offices the japanese had simply intercepted it so my friend the computer systems admin came up with a solution he started sending the data out double block encrypted with des two days after this new distribution plan was implemented the president of the company got a visit from a pair of government agents they told him to knock it off the president gave in since his company did a considerable business with the federal government now if the government wasn t monitoring the communications how would they even know that the encryption system was installed further since encryp tion isn t illegal and des certainly isn t what is the basis of the government s cease and desist demand something similar has happened to me ages ago when we were working on pgp we used to send short messages about development issues or simply to test new features around now at this time pgp and certainly the newer version was unknown over here suddenly the admin at the site i was using received a request that i stop sending encrypted email now there is almost no way that some automatic scanner could have found this since they wouldn t have known about pgp they must have checked for unknown data types in the message tried to unscramble it found they couldn t get past the pem armour part and then contacted the sysadmin and asked me to stop luckily the current email carriers are less picky about what goes over their networks in case people think email scanning doesn t take place i can assure you that it is done regularly by many sites usually not by government agencies or at least not that i know of but by local administrators who for reasons of their own have decided to monitor all communications i m sure you can all think of a whole mess of reasons stop hackers terrorists child pornographers drug dealers evil commies whatever there have been several occasions when i ve got people into trouble simply by including the traditional nsa bait in a message i don t try it any more now a friend of mine was once picked up for mentioning the name of the uk town of scunthorpe hint look for words embedded in it i m sure there are many more examples of this happening in fact if anyone has any examples i d appreciate hearing from them i could use them as ammunition during talks on privacy issues peter pgut cs aukuni ac nz p gutmann cs aukuni ac nz gutmann p kosmos wcc govt nz peterg kcbbs gen nz peter nacjack gen nz peter phlarnschlorpht nacjack gen nz in order of preference one of em s bound to work don t vote you ll only encourage them
