clipper will corrupt cops was wh proposal from police point of view in article fbihh bontchev fbihh informatik uni hamburg de vesselin bontchev writes strnlght netcom com david sternlight writes dwight tuinstra posts a very interesting message in which he comments on the effects of the clipper chip on state and local police actually reading between the lines it could be a very good thing for civil liberties in one respect since it will at least prevent cowboy cops and cowboy state and local agancies from reading your traffic if they tap it illegally instead of reading between the lines try to think a little bit ok if that s way too difficult to you here are some hints indeed the new proposal imposes some additional burocratic burden on the local police if they badly want to tape the magic cookie recipie that your mom is telling you on the phone so guess what they will do propose that the new technology is removed or implement some facilitations of course you won t want to wait until they get the approval from two different agencies to decrypt the conversation between two child molesters because meanwhile those two child molesters might be conspiring about molesting your child right so there should be some way for them to get access to those keys quickly right like they could have a copy of the database and worry about a warrant later i perhaps should have been clearer and more concise in my post but that s what i get from posting at am the central point i made is that local state police agencies attempting to play by the rules and get warrants legit escrowed keys etc may find themselves at the mercy of bureaucratic inertia and agency infighting at the federal level i disagree that this would assist civil liberties by hobbling the cowboy cops it would be a strong incentive as vesselin points out for more police agencies to go rogue and try to get keys through more efficient but less constitutional means notice what the release said q suppose a law enforcement agency is conducting a wiretap on a drug smuggling ring and intercepts a conversation encrypted using the device what would they have to do to decipher the message a they would have to obtain legal authorization normally a court order to do the wiretap in the first place the clear implication is that there are legal authorizations other than a court order just how leaky are these and who knows what s in those pages that authorized the nsa there may well arise a black market of sorts within police agencies in which keys are traded furthermore the police will be in an excellent position to carry out this kind of thing without being caught they already have a communication infrastructure with secure portions there are a few laws that i know of that limit citizens rights to access police communications or use the information they get it may be very difficult to prove police misuse the fact that you have such evidence may itself be evidence that you have broken some other law throw in private detectives who have even fewer policy constitutional restrictions also consider mercenaries who ve retired from intelligence agencies william gibson must be loving it great story material don t think it ll happen well consider e g the michigan state police generally a very professional organization which for years kept red files on thousands of suspected commies knowing full well it was not consititutional the standards of evidence were just about zero people were in the file because they happened to park near a place where say a us china people s friendship rally was happening the police went around writing down license plate numbers if you happened to be visiting a friend who lived near the meeting place well the state police wound up filing you as a subversive they were eventually found out and a court ruled against carrying on any more such nonsense i believe thay may have had to destroy the tapes as well even with well meaning cops and i m sure there are many there will be strong pressure to bend the constitutional safeguards we don t need to assume corrupt or unbalanced officers it will all be in the interest of enforcing sensible laws saving lives and protecting property compromises will be made by well meaning officers facing what to them will be a moral dilemma clipper will make criminals out of cops do we want to do this to our police forces dwight tuinstra best tuinstra sandman ece clarkson edu tolerable tuinstrd craft camp clarkson edu homo sapiens planetary cancer news at six
