I'm pleased to report that USA Today editorializes today (Tuesday, Oct. 24, 1995) against both ITAR and GAK. They get the chronology of the SSL brute-forcing and PRNG seed prediction attacks on Netscape Navigator backwards, but they get many other things right in a fairly short editorial. I am certainly encouraged by this development. Someone at USA Today definitely got the message that the ITAR are a large obstacle to net security in the U.S. Some particularly apropos quotations (from pg. 12A): On ITAR: "[After the Netscape hacks] the perception of the Internet as insecure was indelible. That needn't be. Encryption software available right now is exponentially more powerful and could make code breaking virtually impossible. Its use is blocked by government export regulations that make the programs difficult if not impossible to market, even for domestic purposes." On GAK: "[...] key escrow [...] may sound reasonable, but apply that reasoning to more mundane areas of life. What the government is saying is yes, you can put bars on your windows, locks on your doors and put your jewelry in a safe, but you have to give us the keys and the combination because you might be a crook." That phrasing sounds rather familiar.... "The [GAK] system -- which the FBI and the Commerce Department declined to defend in an opposing view to this editorial [...]" Now I find that surprising. Since when does the FBI not even try to justify Clipper and its descendants in the newspapers ? For foreign readers, I'll note that USA Today has easily the largest national circulation of any daily newspaper in the U.S. [Letters to the editor can be emailed to usatoday@clark.net; they want you to give your snail-mail address and home and work phone numbers so they can check your identity.] -Futplex <futplex@pseudonym.com>