At 02:36 AM 5/19/97 -0700, Greg Broiles wrote:
I ran across this entry in the Congressional Record which discusses several examples where encryption was discovered in the course of a law enforcement investigation.
[Congressional Record: September 18, 1996 (Senate)][Page S10882-S10886]
[...]
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I'm pleased that the Senate has passed the eonomic espionage bill. This is an important measure that I believe
[...]
The third case, however, especially illustrates the seriousness of decryption problems--determining the unique key or in this case, password from a large number of possibilities. According to Agent Davis, a mere 4 character password has 1.9 million possibilities due to the number of keyboard characters. Can you imagine how difficult it must be to figure a short, 4 character password. What if the password were 10 characters or 20 or more? It's easy to see why criminals are moving toward password protection for their records.
With the congress so woefully uninformed that they confuse password protection with cryptography and naive enough to believe that 1.9E6 possibilities represents a serious roadblock to entry, it looks like we have a major education effort to perform. It is interesting that there were no examples in this summary of crypto used for communications -- but that's completely consistent with what we've been hearing all along. - Carl +------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme@cybercash.com http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | |CyberCash, Inc. http://www.cybercash.com/ | |207 Grindall Street PGP 2.6.2: 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 | |Baltimore MD 21230-4103 T:(410) 727-4288 F:(410)727-4293 | +------------------------------------------------------------------+