At 12:18 PM -0400 on 9/15/98, Charles Smith of Win Schwartau's FUDFactory wrote something mildly clueful:

BUSTED CUBAN SPIES USE CRYPTO ----------------------------- FBI officials are proud that they broke up a small ring of Cuban spies in Florida. The Cuban espionage agents are accused of using encryption to encode messages and protect information. Expect Director Freeh to use this bust as one of a hand full historical examples of "crypto" crimes in his next Congressional testimony. According to his last testimony in August 1998, only 17 crimes over the past 10 years have been made more difficult for the FBI by encryption.

What the FBI Director won't tell you is that the Cubans have been sending enciphered messages to their U.N. mission in New York over SHORT-WAVE RADIO for almost 30 years. The Morse code signals are encrypted with a Cuban one-time-pad cipher and transmitted from Havana on a nightly basis. The Cuban encrypted transmissions are so regular - some HAM radio operators set their clocks by it.

----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'