Dr. Denning: Although you are correct that many of the responses to your proposal contained personal attacks (in which people called you naive, etc), you seem to believe that this invalidates the fundamental underlying point they were making. This is not so. This fundamental point can be summarized as follows: The US government has repeatedly shown by its past conduct that it simply cannot be trusted to obey its own laws regarding spying on private citizens, particularly those who are organized in lawful, peaceful opposition to government policies. And history has shown that it can take many years for unlawful monitoring to become public, if indeed they ever do (consider the current story I just sent you about the Army spying on Dr. Martin Luther King). In other words, the government has frequently ignored its own laws, because it knows it can do so with impunity. No credible case can be made that the problem has been "fixed" since the now-publicized abuses of the 1960s and 1970s, i.e., that new safeguards have somehow rendered the government incapable of violating the privacy rights of its citizens. Privacy violations may or may not still be occurring; we have no way to know. But I suspect it depends far more on the people in power than on any post-Watergate "safeguards" against the abuse of that power. The private use of strong cryptography provides, for the very first time, a truly effective safeguard against this sort of government abuse. And that's why it must continue to be free and unregulated. I should credit you for doing us all a very important service by raising this issue. Nothing could have lit a bigger fire under those of us who strongly believe in a citizens' right to use cryptography than your proposals to ban or regulate it. There are many of us out here who share this belief *and* have the technical skills to turn it into practice. And I promise you that we will fight for this belief to the bitter end, if necessary. Phil Karn