Hip Hip Hooray! Clinton will finally let us use _some_ 20+year-old encryption code, which has been known to be relatively weak for 15 years, as long as we give them all our keys! What a guy! I assume he's partly doing this to make a big "See, I'm in favor of high-tech trade and crime-fighting" push in time for the election, and unlike RC4/40, cracking DES on general-purpose processors _is_ a big enough job that probably can't do a distributed crack in two weeks. But still, get real - the NBS/NIST kept recertifying DES every 5 years only because it was in widespread use and there weren't good fast alternatives for the first couple of years (except triple-DES, which on the computers of the time was annoyingly slow.) There were far more powerful systems like Diffie-Hellman and later RSA that were too slow for general use and are now fairly practical, but they're not letting us use them....
Here we go again...from today's NYTimes...Clipper III ... That URL is http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/1001code.html
# Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto