On Tue, 1 Oct 1996 stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 1996 10:06:40 -0700 From: stewarts@ix.netcom.com To: cypherpunks@toad.com Subject: Re: Clipper III on the table
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 have to point out that there is no "relative victory". We have neither won in whole nor in part.
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,
If he even figures that out... he's probably doing it because some advisor said it wouldn't make a difference to crypto, and that advisor would basicly be right.
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.)
Good point.
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....
Not _letting_ you? Exactly which one is the government saying you _CAN'T_ use? I've seen you can't export, you can't use in government work, etc... but never once have I seen a law be _passed_ that said you couldn't use any form of crypto (and I'd like to keep it that way)
# Thanks; Bill
--Deviant They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when not actually threatened. How very nice for authority. I decided not to learn this particular lesson. -- Richard Stallman