Here is the NSA proposal

In 1997, after lobbying by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, one House of Representatives committee actually voted for mandatory backdoors. The committee's rewritten version of the bill, H.R. 695, said: "After January 31, 2000, it shall be unlawful for any person to manufacture for distribution, distribute, or import encryption products intended for sale or use in the United States, unless that product includes features or functions that provide an immediate access to plaintext capability" in response to a court order. The plaintext must be able to be acquired, the legislation said, "without the knowledge or cooperation of the person being investigated."

It is coming up again.  With a court order, the law might read our accounts running under secure ID.



I have a simple rule on this.  The pits and ledgers need to expose amounts for bidding and verification.  I think these devices can handle court orders, properly targeted.  If Coinbase is used for exchange by some nefarious group showing probable cause, then a digital court order can serve to block or snoop on exchange data, including hot wallets.

In secure ID, held by the individual, the story is different. The individual by keeping some data in person, stakes a claim to privacy.  A person registering transactions or bidding expects to lose privacy.  The Fifth applies.

For example,  government requires all secure ID purchases to collect a sales tax.  Now a lot of person to person transactions are currently sales tax exempt.  The secure ID will collect taxes, with a thumb print. A thumb print can be  a valid contract between government and smart ID.  But pits and ledgers, offering public services has no such protection, (Interstate commerce).

Otherwise, secure ID is limited to only the double spend prohibition on digicash, sort of a natural law. And secure ID can  agree to digicash limits on a term contract, universally applied.  In fact, any prohibitions on secure ID need be implemented at the foundry, be enfoceable without thumb print..

This is the neutral approach and a continuation of historical approaches.  If a scofflaw is alive, the courts can chase the thumb print, but cannot make it confess..

NSA real problem

They want to see long complex documents and plans, they want to decrypt data on servers.   Sandbox does not offer that directly,  sandbox is not a text data base or server. Bu secure ID can, and that is  someone else's problem, but it effects sandbox as we use the same 'card', we generally keep one ID.

But that conflict is bottle necking sandbox, and there is almost an emergency need to get secure ID involved in protecting local government data, they are all vulnerable to insider hacks at the moment. That is a different problem, but quite urgent and secure ID and a compromise by the NSA is the only solution. Sandbox is really a spectator, except the part about spending limits on digicash..