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patcat88
join:2002-04-05
Jamaica, NY

patcat88

Member

encryption illegal

So PGP is now illegal just as it was 15 years ago?

I'm waiting for it to be revealed that the FBI and CIA have Verisigns and Thwate and Equifax and Geotrusts private key and can spoof anyone in the world. Also Intel has a list of all the TPM endorsement key in all the TPM chips in the world ready to be subpoenaed.

KodiacZiller
Premium Member
join:2008-09-04
73368

KodiacZiller

Premium Member

said by patcat88:

So PGP is now illegal just as it was 15 years ago?
No, it's not illegal now and I doubt it will ever be. The government lost this fight in the 90's when they put Phil Zimmerman in jail (the inventor of PGP). The Feds eventually dropped their case because they knew it was a losing battle (you know, that pesky thing called the 1st amendment).
I'm waiting for it to be revealed that the FBI and CIA have Verisigns and Thwate and Equifax and Geotrusts private key and can spoof anyone in the world. Also Intel has a list of all the TPM endorsement key in all the TPM chips in the world ready to be subpoenaed.
I do not doubt any of those things. This is why the Certificate Authority model sucks. Who watches the watchers? Who verifies that the CA's are not giving out their private keys and forging certs for LEA's? Hell, who even knows if some of the CA's are not actually ran by the Feds? We don't. We have to trust, and trust is a very bad practice when trying to secure data.

Again, we have been down this road at least twice in the 90's (Zimmerman and also the Clipper Chip) and the government gave up then. The encryption cat is out of the bag and it ain't going back in. It's impossible to regulate information and knowledge that has been on the Internet for decades. If they take down PGP, people will just use GnuPG and other free alternatives where the developers have no commercial interests and can't be bullied.
MyDogHsFleas
Premium Member
join:2007-08-15
Austin, TX

MyDogHsFleas to patcat88

Premium Member

to patcat88
said by patcat88:

So PGP is now illegal just as it was 15 years ago?
You've got your facts wrong. It was never illegal per se. The legal question was around the export of encryption algorithms outside the USA, which was restricted by law at that time. (It is still restricted but the rules are much more lenient, and current PGP implementations are exportable to most countries/entities.)

It's quite clear to me at least that Zimmerman did violate the export regulations at that time, however a case was never prosecuted.