Deja vu all over again?

[mdlbear]

Yesterday The Register posted this article on the dangers of bluetooth phone hacking, and adds "...the idea that your Bluetooth phone might have a porn message secretly embedded in it, as a way to getting you banged up in prison, seems to be the most long-winded extrapolation of a set of ignorant assumptions into an implausible set of possible conclusions."

I am reminded, however, of my 1994 Risks article "Escrowed keys vulnerable to chosen contraband attacks"

Given a class of data that it is unlawful to possess (e.g. child pornography in the US, government secrets almost anywhere), escrowed encryption keys can be forced out of escrow by simultaneously transmitting such data to a site (e.g. via e-mail or anonymous FTP), and asserting to the appropriate authorities that there is probable cause to believe that such data is present at the site.
[...]
A user at the site can easily be tricked into requesting the data, for example by means of a URL that simultaneously transmits the data to the user, and notifies the appropriate authorities. This attack can easily be used against a selected set of users, e.g. those on a mailing list or subscribers to a Usenet news group.

Cordwainer Smith fans will no doubt also have noted the similarity to events in the story "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons".

There was one source that wouldn't talk. The library. He could at least check the obvious, simple things, and find out what there was already in the realm of public knowledge concerning the secret he had taken from the dying boy.
[...]
It never occurred to him that the library itself had been attuned and that the word "kittons" in the peculiar Norstrilian spelling was itself an alert. Looking for that spelling had set off a minor alarm. He had touched the trip-wire.

I once wrote a simple CGI to prove to myself that the trick is distressingly easy to pull off on the web. Be careful out there!