Datasheet

6 1. Introduction
• Also your acquaintances and the possibilities for espionage or sabotage
given by your work can make you an interesting subject for others—for
national intelligence organizations, religious groups, or competitive com-
panies. This is one of the fields with likely the largest percentage of
undetected crimes. We don’t know the proportions of the ‘war behind
the scenes’.
• Businesses are particularly at risk. [IHK] describes a case from the textile
industry, where a company’s major competitor lured away customers
from that company’s customer base. Address lists of any sort are cash!
And people outside the business world shouldn’t be indifferent about
this either. Information is power, and it’s usually the powerful who get
to it more easily. This can lead to new types of painful competitive
imbalances. The customer will feel it in the form of excessive prices,
poor service, and inelastic supply.
• [IHK] points to the fact that scientists in particular see themselves as
colleagues rather than competitors, and such circumstances are recklessly
exploited by national intelligence organizations.
• Don’t forget that some confidential information that may not be of interest
to you can acutely endanger your friends or acquaintances. Possess-
ing third-party information can also be dangerous in some situations.
In February 1995, when insider information about Scientology became
public on the Internet, the sender of this message had used an anony-
mous remailer. A remailer is a computer that strips off all information
about the sender when forwarding emails (which is legitimate and some-
times necessary). On earlier occasions, such messages had been deleted
by unknown people due to alleged disclosure of trade secrets. In this
case, the Finnish police, called in by the FBI and Interpol, and Scientol-
ogy themselves called the remailer operator and requested the sender’s
address be disclosed. While this led to nothing, when the Swedish daily
Dagens Nyheter connected him with child pornography three days later,
the Finnish police waved a search and seizure warrant at him two days
later. The alleged child porn was found to be untenable a couple of days
later. You can read more about this thriller in [Kunz.ct].
• Cryptology doesn’t only deal with data secrecy. It also deals with data
integrity and authorship. If your ATM card is stolen and the thief (or
his organization) manages to cryptanalyze the PIN (see Section 6.6.8),
you might find the money stolen to be the least painful consequence.
The bank may claim that you had passed on your PIN with fraudulent