Feds have lost battle against encryption
There is an editorial in the June 11 San Jose Mercury News titled, "Feds have lost battle against encryption". It mentions the Sun/Elvis+ deal, and representative Goodlatte's bill. It says, "Government warriors should pack up their rusty cannons, admit that they've lost this battle, and learn to live in the 1990s." It speaks favorably of increased sentencing for criminal use of encryption. It says the bill does not go far enough in removing export controls. Try http://www.sjmercury.com for a copy. (I haven't looked, so no guarantees.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The Internet was designed | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | to protect the free world | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | from hostile governments. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA
The really ironic issue of late has been supercomputer exports. We now have the spectacle of William Reinsch saying that export restrictions on supercomputer *hardware* are unworkable because the technology is available all around the world. This is the very same Commerce official who still says with a straight face that export controls on encryption *software* are workable and desirable. And we have the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the same committee that recently approved the SAFE act to deregulate crypto exports, calling for an investigation into Commerce's approval of recent supercomputer exports to China. Yet I presume nobody minds that we can ship as many Pentiums as we want to China. Somebody really needs to say the words "distributed computing" to Congress. Perhaps that will be the major benefit of the DES Challenge project when (not if) it succeeds. Phil
Phil Karn <karn@qualcomm.com> writes:
Somebody really needs to say the words "distributed computing" to Congress. Perhaps that will be the major benefit of the DES Challenge project when (not if) it succeeds.
I don't think the issue with china is key cracking. The Chinese supposedly used the supercomputers for weapons design and simulation, which require significanly finer grained parallelism (and hence lower-latency communication) than key cracking.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 09:16 AM 6/12/97 -0700, Phil Karn wrote:
Somebody really needs to say the words "distributed computing" to Congress. Perhaps that will be the major benefit of the DES Challenge project when (not if) it succeeds.
Too bad there isn't a simple word for "a computer in every vending machine, VCR and even styrofoam coffee cup, capable of doing strong crypto". -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 5.0 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM6BNM1QXJENzYr45AQEzEQP/YV3m4vdFhPt2QRz1OvEkDldvvWv0ti+g aUTN7UxSTr/4wLB3Km7iRhYIM5D9tG54ikPT6y1PO//O0bqtGycy/IcbfXhP7shn 7pfpqB48/8Wn2gZb2dxPRNLkg48EBgkmWnabFaR8hnxPsl6MjHDQnbtCsl45b1uc PAdDTIquNqw= =V/Xm -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- +------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme@cybercash.com http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | |CyberCash, Inc. http://www.cybercash.com/ | |207 Grindall Street PGP 2.6.2: 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 | |Baltimore MD 21230-4103 T:(410) 727-4288 F:(410)727-4293 | +------------------------------------------------------------------+
On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, Carl Ellison wrote:
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At 09:16 AM 6/12/97 -0700, Phil Karn wrote:
Somebody really needs to say the words "distributed computing" to Congress. Perhaps that will be the major benefit of the DES Challenge project when (not if) it succeeds.
Too bad there isn't a simple word for "a computer in every vending machine, VCR and even styrofoam coffee cup, capable of doing strong crypto".
ubiquitious but maybe that isnt simple
participants (5)
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Bill Frantz -
Carl Ellison -
Jim Burnes -
Phil Karn -
Secret Squirrel