- I'm writing a piece on the politics of surveillance/privacy technologies for OMNI, essentially a survey of their advance since the 1967 proposal for the National Data Center. I cover cryptography, deriving the narrative from Clipper Chip initiative. The point I'm trying to make is that given the market forces pushing commerce onto the public networks and the increasing power of available encryption, the cold war national apparatus will have to mobilize quickly a la digital telephony to stomp it - yet the nature of computing puts them in a loosing position in the long run. Toward the latter part of this thesis, I've been told - and want check with youz - of the exponential relationship of crytographer and cryptanalyst. The heart of this relationship has been explained to me as follows: Increasing the key by one bit effectively doubles the number of keys and proportionally increases the power required to break it in a brute force attack. Is this true? Is there a truer way of stating it? Are there complicating factors this excludes that I should discuss? - Regards, - Peter Cassidy