Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!news.funet.fi!hydra!hylka!sorsa
From: sorsa@cc.helsinki.fi
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: a Hidden Prodigy
Message-ID: <4034.2747f1e2@cc.helsinki.fi>
Date: 19 Nov 90 14:53:22 GMT
References: <'4&^6&|@rpi.edu>
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 25

In article <'4&^6&|@rpi.edu>, kyoto@pawl.rpi.edu (Jesse N. Schell) writes:

> questions. Should the owners of a BBS be allowed to read your mail?
> The only answer I can see to this is that the owners of the BBS should
> make their policy clear...If they are going to read your messages, you
> should know about it. I can see one day soon, however, people are going to
> want a BBS where the owners guarantee that they will not read private 
> messages. This would be difficult to implement, but not impossible...

>    Is the US government going to have a US mail Email network in the
> future? Will we trust them with it? How will we know if the FBI is reading
> our mail? I don't think it could work... I mean, they can still tap our
> phones and open our mail if they want, but it is so much easier to
> intercept an electronic message...

Anyone familiar with data encryption knows a message can be crypted so that
it's practically impossible ( even for the FBI ) to decrypt them without the
key. Of course, there's still the problem of how the key(s) are kept secret - 
would you keep your keycode in a piece of paper in your wallet or on your PC's
hard disk ? Wouldn't be surprised if a similar "computer crimes" shoul arise
against "protected" BBS's as there are now against computer systems.

Greetins from far [ unsafe ] smurf -> extern [volatile] void universe()

					Mika Sorsa