The Foundation for Information Policy Research is a UK organization
that recently submitted comments to that government's Home Office
about proposed legislation. One set of published comments
<http://www.fipr.org/060901encryption.pdf> concerns the RIP Act, which
presumably has been discussed here or is generally known by Group
members. Reading F.I.P.R.'s submission, I had a few questions that
people here might be able and inclined to answer:
1. From the article: "Most encryption products now offer
multiple-key disk encryption, a concept pioneered by FIPR Chair
Professor Ross Anderson, along with Adi Shamir and Roger Needham in
their paper on "The Steganographic File System," which was written in
response to early key escrow moves. Such systems let a user create
multiple encrypted partitions, without an outsider knowing how many.";
Does GnuPG implement this?
2. From the article: "The Home Office should also bear in mind that
the most successful legislation is technology neutral, as technology
moves much faster than law. Access to keys was first mooted (recently)
in the USA in 1993, and in the UK by DTI minister Ian Taylor in
1996." How was access to keys mooted in the US?
3. The article's description of a duress key as something that will
decrypt file A while destroying file B is intriguing. I have seen hot
keys on programs that will destroy an encrypted and mounted volume,
but I have not seen the type of double-duty duress encryption key
described in the article. What programs have this?
.