We want to work through the market. What that means is, if the market turns in unexpected directions, we have to be ready to re-evaluate our policy. So I don't think you're going to see a "final" version ever. As long as the market moves and changes, our policy will be tweaked to accommodate what's happening.
In other words ... If we don't approve, it's time to go back to ITAR and 40-bits.
I don't think they're doing it just because the government asked them to; they're doing it because they see a market. In addition, in the spring the FBI and the Justice Department asked companies to come in to see if a technical solution could be found to deal with these issues. Companies have done that, too.
It must be nice to be able to pressure and threaten companies behind the scenes and then come out to the public to say that they are "cooperating" or "volunteering".
At the same time, of all the economic sectors in the country, this one's moving the fastest. There's a real danger that, if we can't get our policy together and out there in the marketplace soon, we could be overtaken by events overseas.
In other words, "all this time we've been denying that there was overseas competition, well, we were lying through our teeth." "And that thing with the EU complaining about Echelon and the Germans trying to head up the Europeans to bust ITAR/EAR ..." Oops! Can't say the "E" word in public because "nobody" knows about that!
I think you have to contrast that situation, which was reasonably artificial, with the reality of law enforcement. In this case, it took a decent amount of resources to crack a specific message that, I believe, the people doing the crack knew was in English, and knew was one message.
Must be nice not having real technologists pointing out blatant flaws/lies in your public statments.
Now, if you're the FBI, think about that. From their standpoint, we're talking about traffic that isn't so easily identifiable. It might be a long stream of encrypted material that they're trying to intercept in real time; they don't necessarily know what language it's in; they don't necessarily know what
Sure ... if the FBI were really stupid ... and the FBI didn't really want to do any homework, but instead, would rather have NSA's dictionaries do the walking ... encryption would be a real bitch, wouldn't it? Even 40-bit. Ern