Monetary transactions will take place through cyberspace if people believe that it is protected. And the same thing is true for medical records. If people believe that there is security and that the network cannot be cracked, then they will use if for financial and other purposes. Superhighway industries will be born only as assurances can be given that there is security on these networks.
The possibilities [for hacking attacks] are really good. Public networks will make all sorts of new wire-tapping possible. Packet data networks – including the Internet – are broadcast media, which send traffic through hub sites that don’t give you the same level of confidence as the phone company. There are many more opportunities in the data world for wiretapping and spoofing attacks … Link-layer encryption will become nearly universal, along with end-to-end application encryption.
Secure-HTTP will eliminate possible violation problems, we must ask how happy our potential foreign trading partners will be with it. We’re essentially saying that we will communicate over the infohighway with them using crypotography that is deliberately weakened.
The future of the electronic superhighway is voice, video and data … Data will get blended together and shipped in more and more technically refined and convenient ways into the home.
Legal, governmental, medical and … nearly every service that uses paper today could do business via the NII … The process of moving around the paper forms and letters that constitute business mail, for example, consumes tens of billions of dollars annually.
NII users would fill out different E-forms to, say, order goods, settle transactions, or find people and services. Over time, these E-forms would grow in kind and number and would constitute the common currency, or language, of computer communication via the NII. In time, the typed text on the NII’s [National Information Infrastructure’s] early E-forms might be replaced with speech. To buy a jacket, you might answer voice prompts asking what color, size and material you want.
The real experiment I’m trying to do is e-mail science. The “anomalous heat” project is just an excuse. I think this is the media of the future.
Although criminals may, in fact, not use Clipper, it is conceivable that over time market forces could favor escrowed encryption. Organizations might require key escrow for their own protection, and vendors could favor it for its export advantage. The government will be ordering key-escrow products, and demand for interoperability could lead to its proliferation. Criminals could choose key escrow because it is more readily available, to communicate with the rest of the world, or to allow their own emergency access.
The risks associated with the compromise or misuse of keys will be negligible. Thus, key escrow will not degrade encryption’s capability to protect against crime on the information superhighway, only its capability to conceal crime.
If encryption comes into widespread use on the information superhighway, this could seriously jeopardize law enforcement and the public safety. Encryption is also a threat to foreign intelligence operations, and thus can affect national security.