Partner Event (Calyx): Multi-party Off-The-Record (OTR) Messages and Deniability

Please RSVP and find more details here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/multi-party-otr-and-deniability-tickets-9517331595

Our friends at the Calyx Institute are holding a panel discussion on Monday Dec. 2nd, at the intersection of law and technology.

Calyx is interested in having a legal perspective on this nascent tech issue at the cutting edge of encryption. Specifically, here are the issues on which Calyx is seeking feedback:

1. In a real civil or criminal court... there are rules of evidence. Presumably evidentiary transcripts are challenged in some situations. What rules of evidence are used to authenticate chat transcripts, what challenges are or could be made, and would deniability help, harm, or be irrelevant?

2. In some courts and situations, the court is accepting a digital signature of a person to be a positive affirmation of something that represents a binding or authenticated action or promise. In this case, would the deniability of a chat protocol be important? So that someone couldn't produce an transcript lacking deniability, and say "Look, Alice signed this statement"?

Ultimately, our goal is to spark a debate on these topics among legal scholars. Discussion is the main goal of this event.

We'd like to take notes, Chatham House style, and send them to the folks working on mpOTR, so we can say "Look, we had actual lawyers postulate on deniability, and while you shouldn't take it as legal advice, they think X, Y, and maybe Z."