Re: About "Lawful Intercept"
Ok, let me try to explain this again:
1.) Governments think they need to be able to look into all communications, because certain groups might use the telecom network to coordinate criminal activities up to and including armed action against other people.
2.) The Status Quo is that governments obtain key material by means of covert hacking of "interesting" computers. The German government says so quite openly.Snowden documents also strongly hint towards this
Governments make sure there will be exploitable bugs even in the latest OS versions.
The downside of this is that all sorts of criminals can use the very same backdoors. And they do, to great loss of the affected banks and other corporations. Kaspersky reports of a bank in Ukraine which was completely penetrated. The SWIFT is also attacked daily, with some success on the side of the criminals.
The largest ship operator, Maersk has recently been hacked with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
A major American pharmaceutical company has been hit by a virus which shut down production of one of their drugs.
British NHS is hit by attacks almost periodically with bad effects on their ability to treat patients.
We do not need much imagination to see how much this hurts the real world economy.
3.) To change the problem of 2.) I suggest laws mandating Key Escrow. I understand your concerns about a single, national electronic database of crypto keys. I do think it would be possible to create a system with acceptable risks by compartmentalizing the Key Store. There would be e.g. 10 departments handling/storing the keys sent in by postal letter. Each department would be responsible for a certain region of the nation. Initially, key letters would simply be stuffed into a locked paper file and only be scanned for law verification purposes. The key storage center would of course be tightly guarded like other high security facilities.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
