Tonight, on the CBS show "60 minutes", we saw as the first portion the story of Carlos Salinas, the ex-president of Mexico, and his brother Raul, who managed to acquire $300 million despite the fact that his legitimate income never exceeded $190,000 in any year. Well, Raul's in jail now, and his probably-crooked brother is in self-imposed exile (escape?) in Ireland. Okay, you ask, is this relevant to Cypherpunks? Sure! The government's wanting to maintain an encryption policy to ensure that it is capable of reading encrypted traffic, right? Well, the Bush and Clinton administration signed NAFTA with Mexico when it was run by a crook. Where was the CIA? The NSA? Raul's money went through Citibank. Where's the FBI? Isn't that one of the reasons we have such agencies? Or is corruption among family members of the Presidend an old and established practice? (Cattle futures? Sounds like a lotta bull to me!) Why wasn't this stuff revealed by the US government? Did it consider this corruption a failure? Or a SUCCESS? If we can't trust the US government to keep us from dealing with sleazy government's like Mexico, and exposing them, then why are we signing long-term trade agreements with them? How much of Raul's money was due to NAFTA, for example? Anyway, I think here's yet another reason to reject any kind of "National Crypto Policy" that's claimed to allow the government to snoop: Clearly, they can't even be trusted to do the right thing with their information when they don't have to decrypt it. I sure as hell am not going to expect them to do any better in the future. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com