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From: werner@ut-ngp.UUCP (Werner Uhrig)
Newsgroups: net.ham-radio,net.video,net.crypt,net.mail,net.legal
Subject: Re: Some comments on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act
Message-ID: <3963@ut-ngp.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 11-Sep-86 14:33:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: ut-ngp.3963
Posted: Thu Sep 11 14:33:22 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Sep-86 21:37:11 EDT
References: <1031@frog.UUCP> <15591@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <1240@mhuxo.UUCP> <301@petrus.UUCP>
Organization: UTexas Computation Center, Austin, Texas
Lines: 17
Summary: making things easier for spooks ...
Xref: mnetor net.ham-radio:2232 net.video:2191 net.crypt:574 net.mail:1143 net.legal:3509

In article <301@petrus.UUCP>, karn@petrus.UUCP (Phil R. Karn) writes:
> I think Mike and Joe miss the point. The idea of the act is to make it
> easier for OUR spooks (the NSA) to monitor the communications of naive
> American civilians by giving them a false sense of security.

I had long suspected it:  Encoded communications contain a certain "signature"
which makes them easy to identify in the MASS of communications.  Either
it can be detected by the pure randomness of the bits, or, maybe, the crypto
device has a little "innocuous" commercial in the header of each message;
something like:  "Safe communications - another service of <your favorite
3-letter company goes here>"

It is thus easy for the spook to identify the messages worth paying ATTention
to .... and, of course, having the decoder helps ...(-:

	---Werner	"The best encryption is a low signal-to-noise ratio.
			 that's why I often mumble senselessly..."