Week 3: Law & Internet Seminar

The Cryptography Wars

Cryptography is important to many of the activities we will discussing this semester. It plays a role in securing communications, in hiding information (thus enabling privacy and anonymity), and in Internet commerce, digital cash, secure digital signatures. There are applications to intellectual property too, such as "digital watermarks". .

Reading:

  1. Philip Zimmermann, Why Do You Need PGP?. Here is an alternate site if the first one is down.
  2. FBI Director Louis Freeh tells the Senate that he supports mandatory key escrow for domestic cryptography.
  3. A. Michael Froomkin, The Metaphor is the Key: Cryptography, the Clipper Chip and the Constitution, 143 U. Penn. L. Rev. 709 (1995)). There is more than you need to know about the Clipper Chip here. I suggest you skim Part 1 but pay special attention to the section called "How Clipper Works", try skipping Part 2, and concentrate on parts 3 & 4.
  4. A. Michael Froomkin, It Came From Planet Clipper: The Battle Over Cryptographic Key "Escrow"
  5. Compare the decisions in the Bernstein I, Bernstein II, and Bernstein III cases with the decision in Karn v. U.S. (Note: you need to page down a little to find the text of the decision). Here is an unofficial but much more readable version of Bernstein III
  6. Oct '97: The European Union issues a new report on crypto policy that rejects the US-based idea of mandatory key escrow.
     

Doing:

  1. Visit the web pages of all seminar participants as they become available.
  2. Add a new hypertext link to your homepage.
  3. Add a "mailto" link to your homepage that allows readers to send you an email message.
  4. Put a "last modified" date on your page(s). Please keep these accurate as the seminar progresses.