>Let's not boil the ocean here. Many criminals use COTS solutions. >Disabling their technology in a way that is still provides satisfactory >for privacy for ordinary citizens would be a useful engineering goal >that pragmatically addresses both their need for privacy and the >need for law enforcement. It seems to me there's some straightforward solutions here. As the "Keys Under Doormats" paper notes, the same devices are used all over the world and it is unlikely that countries would accept key escrow that they don't control. Hence the obvious way to do key splitting is to send a piece to the government of every country where they sell, say, iPhones. If the governments of China, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Nigeria, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Brazil (and the US) all agree that something is bad enough to disclose, it must be pretty bad. On the other hand, if that's a bad idea, or it's ridiculous, I'd be interested in seeing the research comparing the largly hypothetical costs of secure crypto to the easily measured costs of having our high tech devices shut out of all those markets. R's, John