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

[Adam Back]

James Backhouse <j.p.backhouse@lse.ac.uk> writes:
> The origins of the now almost defunct Cockney dialect, [...], 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.

What you're saying is that Cockney a symmetric key algorithm -- DES
also has the same problem -- the need to agree a key in advance.
However there the similarity ends: Cockney is a weak cipher, and also
the key is shared amongst all the users.  What we need is to update
Cockney.

With email you can have a computer assist the steganographic encoding
you use in your speech, so strong computer assisted modern day Cockney
is possible also -- just replace radix 64 with "texto" (textual
steganography program) or more plausible alternative, and use say PGP
underneath that.  

Small messages are easy to encode plausibly in email, or even over the
phone wth no computer assistance (to send "yes" or "no", or to send a
date, etc) is trivial, larger transfers you need computer assistance,
and higher bandwidth host comms channel to hide the data in -- say
perhaps a internet telephony or video link.

> 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.

What ecommerce requires is public key crypto, and strong algorithms.
Most of ecommerce is actually authentication -- banks are pretty
cooperative with law enforcement anyway.  What the key grabbers are
after is user communications.  (eg. observe financial exemptions to
ITAR/EAR, SET use of 768 bit RSA exportable from US for financial part
of data etc.)

With public key steganography, and high quality natural language mimic
functions we should be able to obtain good plausible deniability for
data transfers.  As long as courts retain any semblance of innocence
until proven guilty, the IRA, mobsters, drug barons etc. can and
presumably already are communicating with impunity.

Meanwhile, DTI, and the UK government with GCHQ/CESG/NSA lurking in
the shadows are trying to hang on to mass key word scanning ability,
so they can continue to monitor of political targets and continue to
engage in fishing expeditions.

Adam
-- 
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)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`