Personal use of encryption was - Re: CGT and other whinges

[Tony Barry]

At 11:29 PM 1998/08/16, Greg Taylor wrote:
>Yet if Defence is allowed to have its way, Australia too will be subject to
>similarly foolish restraints on academic freedom by way of a ban on
>intangible exports.

I'm a bit dumb on all of this. Is this right?

1. I can get good encryption software off the net now of the kinds
governments say is naughty as its too hard for them to break.

2. Forget browsers and all these bells and whistles. I can use the software
to encrypt a file on my machine with my private key.

3. I can tell a mate (mate 1) in some other country (Skase perhaps) what my
public key might be.

4. I can send a message to another mate (mate 2) with the file attached who
can get the key from mate 1 to decode it.

There is no problem until a government agency intercepts my messages and
wants to decode them. They are very cross. Do I say -

        What message?
        I've lost the key.
        You have no right to read this
        Gee it was a gif and must have been corrupted.
        From my machine?? I've been spoofed!
        Gee I don't always lock the door and somebody could have got
         to my workstation.
        It's not encrypted. I'm beta testing the next version of Microsoft
         Word and its their new format. I'll try to recover it but it
         doesn't always work

On a simple day to day basis surely any attempt to control encryption is on
a hiding to nothing??

Tony

   ________________________________________________________
      mailto:tonyb@netinfo.com.au      |  Ningaui Pty Ltd
     mailto:me@Tony-Barry.emu.id.au    |   GPO Box 1680
   http://purl.oclc.org/NET/Tony.Barry | Canberra ACT 2601
         Phone +61 2 6241 7659         |    AUSTRALIA