At 03:04 AM 7/18/96 -0700, David Sternlight wrote:

Serious studies have shown that the kinds of protections to make the systems we depend on robust against determined and malicious attackers (say a terrorist government, or one bent on doing a lot of damage in retaliation for one of our policies they don't like)

"Policies"? There you go again. A "policy," at least in regard to the US government, is not merely opinion, but is action. Action which may (legitimately) anger people. Action which may not genuinely be in the interests of American people, although you'd never get those government thugs to admit it. If somebody overseas doesn't like a US government "policy," maybe the best thing to do is to determine whether it's actually beneficial to the ordinary American citizen, or whether its benefits can be achieved simply by changing government behavior. So what's the best way to avoid "terrorism"? Maybe the fastest, more efficent, and overall best way to avoid it is to get the US government to stop doing things that foment it, rather than trying to protect against it after the fact. , have costs beyond the capability

of individual private sector actors. Your friendly neighborhood ISP, for instance, probably can't affort the iron belt and steel suspenders needed to make his system and its connectivity sabotage-proof, and so on. Even cheap but clever solutions involving encryption in such systems require standards and common practices across many institutions.

None of which require government actions to achieve. If anything, what is required is that governments STOP doing things which discourage such implementations of encryption. Government is the problem, not the solution.

In such a case, where public benefits from government action greatly exceed public (taxpayer) costs,

This is the classic Sternlight misrepresentation. Chances are excellent that this public benefit you speak of is almost totally a benefit to government employees, not ordinary citizens. Government's "solutions" are predictably skewed to maintain government budgets, not actually designed to solve the underlying problem. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com