Patiwat Panurach asks:
On Tue, 23 Jan 1996, Duncan Frissell wrote:
On the whole, the cypherpunks have gotten very favorable press for a group who's actions may render government policies irrelevant and possibly the governments themselves.
Would you call cypherpunks (as a group and as a philosophy) to be influential? Do you think governments listen to us much? Are they forced to listen to us? Any stuff to support this? Please give me your comments.
Yes, I would say the actions of the people active on this list have had significant effectst. To give one example: Last summer, 'we' broke 40-bit RC4. Within a week or two, the US government started to discuss making 64-bit escrowed crypto exportable (not acceptable, but it's a change). In the private sector, the opinion in a lot of US firms was 'yeah, 40 bits may be weak, but marketing wants to have a single "secure version" of the product, so we'll sell the 40 bit version domestically and abroad - after all, 40 bits is only theoretically weak - no one's ever broken it." After the highly publicized SSL crack, it suddenly became a *lot* easier for engineers to argue for separate domestic versions with stronger encryption. I personally know of three firms where this occured, and I'm sure there are more. Peter Trei Senior Software Engineer Purveyor Development Team Process Software Corporation http://www.process.com trei@process.com