Crypto wars redux?

[Roland Perry]

In article <CCE82388-C003-48DA-B830-29612843D120 at batten.eu.org>, Ian 
Batten <igb at batten.eu.org> writes
>> Well any terrorist who does not use end-to-end encryption deserves all he gets.
>
>Yet again, it appears that the security services are forgetting that the communications they're
>interested in are between small numbers of people (unlike, say, an army or a government) who
>have lawful right to be in the country (unlike, say, the Krogers) and who probably aren't
>fussed about timescales substantially tighter than a couple of days (ie first class post),
>and those people are only exchange small amounts of data (as opposed to, say, photographs of
>stolen plans of ships).  Word code in letters, word code between call boxes, person to person
>meetings, one time pads...

And everyone else is probably forgetting that gathering information 
about who is contacting who, is most of the time just as valuable as 
what was actually said.
-- 
Roland Perry