Re: humo[u]r in law

[Paul Koning <pkoning@xxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Williams <peterw@valicert.com> writes:

 Peter> If an certificate-bearing, encrypted S/MIME message
 Peter> (BER-encoded) is encrypted under an S/MIME process, and a
 Peter> party hands over the keying material necessary to decrypt the
 Peter> payload to ANY court (including an International court
 Peter> presumably), is the result "readable and comprehensible" -
 Peter> being BER-encoded?

 Peter> The corollary of this, if true, is that it would define all
 Peter> BER-encoded data (such as certificates) as having a readable
 Peter> and comprehensible format. This has relevance to that debate
 Peter> which demands that consumers have obtained "readable and
 Peter> comprensible" certificates before they can be held to have
 Peter> truly accepted a certificate.

I don't see a problem.  "Readable and comprehensible" doesn't have to
apply to the raw data; it's perfectly reasonable to rely on a tool.
For example, a tape recording of someone speaking in plain language
should be considered to meet those criteria, yet without a tape player 
it is a useless bit of plastic.

A somewhat related topic appears in US FCC regulations, part 97:
Amateur radio transmissions may not be encrypted (with a very small
limited exception).  For purposes of that rule, encodings that are
defined by readily accessible specifications and aren't intended to
obscure the contents are not considered "encryption"; the fact that
such an encoding may be complex and may require special decoding
apparatus to convert the signal into humanly-intellegible form is no
object. 

	paul