On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Brown, R Ken wrote:
I think you have missed the point. It's not that they are reading messages sent by foreign governments. They are reading - at least potentially - all the messages sent by their own citizens.
Well.. like I said before, I would not doubt much that is attributed to government agencies along these lines. I do not trust NSA to give me privacy: not only is it not their job, one can be more or less assured that such groups with the power to eavesdrop, will, even if it is a few rogue individuals. This is why I create my own privacy; and if they can get past the crypto that I use, then my hat goes off to them.
Some US citizens (I am not one) seem to have a touching faith in the idea that the CIA and NSA will not spy on US citizens because it isn't in the powers given to them.
There is no love lost between my government and I, especially the likes of certain groups, like CIA. I suspect that the spooks do more than sit on a wire and listen too. But this has nothing to do with the fact that US citizens can _use_ whatever type of crypto we damn well feel like. NSA might not give us the goods on what sort of crypto _they_ use, but hell, this is to be expected! No sweet military technology is given up for public consumption until it is more or less useless. why should we expect crypto to be any different?
I suspect I would try very hard to limit the amount of strong crypto that these governments have.
But they haven't managed to do that. And it isn't really what they want to do. They want to limit the strong crypto available to *you* because they want to read *your* mail.
This is paranoia, plain and simple. If this were true, I'd expect to see some evidence. If they didn't want U.S. citizens to have decent crypto, why be involved with DES at all? Why release Skipjack? Why not lobby Congress (like they do so well) and kill AES? If they don't want us to have decent crypto, why does the U.S. government give us so much of it?! As far as I can tell you will either have to claim that the crypto they give us is shit, which there is no evidence for, or you need to come up with a way that giving us strong crypto lets them read our mail (in the long-term maybe?). Either way, it is a good-ole fashion self-reinforcing conspiracy theory. No thanks. I'd be the first to admit that there are a bunch of bad apples in the government.. sure.. but I can't see how we can reasonably claim some far-reaching conspiracy to turn the U.S. into a police state.
Their job is to read the Other Guy's messages, and to make sure the Other Guy can't read Uncle Sam's messages. We speculate that they do both reasonably well.
And *you* *are* the Other Guy. Wake up and smell the static.
This may very well be. Why do you think I have PGP installed? I'm not saying NSA is our friend, for Christ's sake.. there are plenty of things about NSA policy that I dislike. There are probably a whole shit-load of things that I don't know about that I would hate. But none of this makes NSA look any different in my eyes than any other group of bastards who have been given a bit of authority and have been around for more than 10 minutes. So what else is new? I'm merely saying that Forte Meade doesn't have a Room 101 is all .. NSA isn't the last bastion of evil, guys, they are a real pain in the ass, sure... but if you ask my third-grade teacher, she would probably say the same thing about me. I'd love to see NSA get disbanded, and while I'm at it, I figure it might be nice to disband the whole damn Union too. But not only is that not realistic, it is probably pretty damn dangerous given the boat load of freaks and psychos we have running around in this country. ..now, if you'll excuse me, I have a boat to catch.. Michael J. Graffam (mgraffam@mhv.net) http://www.mhv.net/~mgraffam -- Philosophy, Religion, Computers, Crypto, etc "Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine." Henry David Thoreau "Civil Disobedience"