right to speak language of choice (Re: DTI Policy Response)

[James Backhouse]

-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
To: ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk <ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk>
Date: 29 April 1998 00:16
Subject: right to speak language of choice (Re: DTI Policy Response)
>
>But you still have the right to remain silent.  I think it is more
>akin to the following scenario:
>
>Alice says to Bob in email:
>
>: Are you free for a meeting on 30th with Mickey Mouse?
>
>Now this could be a normal communication, where Mikey Mouse is their
>nick name for a friend or it could be coded -- perhaps Alice and Bob
>have met before and agreed that this message will mean that Bob is to
>carry out an IRA hit on the given date.  This knowledge they agreed is
>their cryptographic `key'.
>
>If Alice or Bob are requested to hand over the key and they say `no
>comment' they can not be locked up soley for refusing to reveal this
>key.
>
>Cryptography is just a more formalised method of encrypting
>information.  Why should people be required to speak in terms that
>government can follow?  Surely people are allowed to talk in slang,
>foreign languages, and make use of in-joke references (Mickey Mouse
>could be a reference only understood with context of either parties
>shared experience, they would both understand the referred person.)

>
>If people talk in such a way that their conversation can not be easily
>understood with out this contextual information, the government does
>not have any legal basis to demand they re-count the context and
>shared experiences the in jokes are based upon.


There is nothing new under the sun they say...

The origins of the now almost defunct Cockney dialect, with elements of
Irish, Romance Gypsy etc, lie in the slang used by the criminal underworld
in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to befuddle agents of law
enforcement.  The question is that this method of encrypting/decrypting
information is informal and hence requires face to face interaction to learn
the code.

By contrast what eCommerce requires is formal, and hence protocol-driven
virtual interaction and what law enforcement is looking for is a formal and
predictable way of decoding.

James Backhouse
London School of Economics