Today's "Notable quote" - "... I have to say up front I don't speak for the CIA and this is just me. I can tell you I did my doctoral work studying Soviet-East European personal computing. I have seen export controls and all that close at hand, and actually kicked the tires and things and all that. I can say I agreed nearly 100% with what Mr. Diffie said, up until he said something that surprised me, in that this room didn't shout it down. That was when he said information is less dangerous than physical things. Good God! If you believe that, I'll give you a choice. I can go to your school district and give out one hit of PCP, or I can cover the area with instructions on how to make it. All I'd ask you to keep in mind is to have some sympathy for the foreign policy-niks who know that, in a sort of frustrated air, when it's hard to move information around, it's unlikely that someone can even get an atomic bomb plan, despite the fact that we've got tens of thousands in both the former Soviet Union and in the United States. But I would fear someone giving out the Princeton dissertation and broadcasting it over the nets to all and sundry in that form -- now, given plutonium, we can make a bomb. So, information is a dangerous thing, in the right hands. I think we're all selling ourselves short if we think information is an unempowered commodity. All that said, I have to agree with everything else. Cryptography is not magic, it's math, and DES is not only here, it's on a server in Helsinki, so we have to live with the fact that information moves around. We may want to be sympathetic to the fact that there are people, in fact people without the tools that we all have here, trying to enact the current and past foreign policy. Help educate them, help tell them why these things are happening, but realize that we're disrupting a lot of things real fast." -- Ross Stapleton, Central Intelligence Agency "WHO HOLDS THE KEYS?" Friday, March 20, 1992 Chair: Dorothy Denning, Georgetown University Panel: Jim Bidzos, RSA Data Security David Bellin, Pratt Institute John Gilmore, Cygnus Support Whitfield Diffie, SunSoft, Inc. John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation Paul Ferguson | "Government, even in its best state, Network Integrator | is but a necessary evil; in its worst Centreville, Virginia USA | state, an intolerable one." fergp@sytex.com | - Thomas Paine, Common Sense Type bits/keyID Date User ID pub 1024/1CC04D 1993/03/15 Paul Ferguson <fergp@sytex.com> Key fingerprint = EE D2 93 7D 04 6D C6 05 AC 36 AD 9D 8E 4F 41 58