On this topic... We had lunch with the deputy director of the NSA yesterday. In between agreeing to put backdoors in the Internet, help round up subversives and build a DES cracker :-) the topic of telephone tapping came up. One point that was quite clear, a lot of what happens in the federal government has more to do with the agency structure than common sense. When the NSA are being asked to comment on an export license they are being asked "is this thing dangerous", not "should it be exported". But when the response comes back to commerce "its dangerous" you can hardly expect the person on the other end to put their neck out on the line and risk allowing an export license. Out another way this is a beuracracy where the objective is to avoid the negative rather than gamble for a positive. Where risks are taken they are calculated beuracratic risks. What is needed is a federal task force to reevaluate the crypto export issue. This should look at whether the effect of the embargo is positive or negative. Of course the result would be known in advance but would provide a shield to hide behind. Would be useful if some other counterproductive policies were re-examined at the same time, like the persecution of Phil Zimmerman. On ITAR he did say that the policy met the desired objective. The particular objective concerned was not stated however. Probably if they could tell us the objective we could provide a solution but then again if they told us it would probably defeat the objective in itself. On telephone tapping the statement was made that they do not allow unauthorized taps and that technology was making wildcat taps by local officials harder. Which makes sense. If the taps are performed digitally they should be easier to monitor at a management level. It is a fair point that just because technology has changed the nature of the game it should not mean that wiretaps cease to be possible. What is very odd however is the FBI request for $500 million. This is a somewhat large quantity of money to say the least. The telephone switches are programmable these days, it should be possible to provide tapping at substantially less cost. Mind you the Federal government is not known for tight cost control. The NSA reconned that a DES cracker would cost substantially more than $1 million because the system costs would be much higher than the component costs. "And it would only be able to operate on one keystream at once", also note "DES is used more for authenticity than for confidentialty by banks". One reading, the NSA can get the info they need at less cost than breaking DES because the financial feeds are using DES to provide CBC residues for MACs rather than encryption. Anyway the NSA price estimate was "two or more orders of magnitude more in cost". I dispute that since we brought in the ZEUS trigger system at arround $40 million five years ago and it is vastly more complex than a DES cracker, this constitutes a system cost of about ten times the raw component cost. there was considerably more component diversity and system copmplexity than any cypher machine would need. The raw input bandwidth of 6 Terabytes/sec would chew up DEs keyspace very quickly (ie it is equaivalent to exhausting a 40bit keyspace in a second). If the NSA want a cheap DES cracker they have my number. I'll take 5% ot the difference between the actual cost and $100 million (their estimate of cost) as my fee. Phill