Sorry if this has been stated before, but exactly when do Chaum's first set up e-cash related patents expire? I looked it up in applied crypto the last time I had my hands on it and couldn't find the dates. How many (and what) patents are there in this field anyway? (don't bother with that if it's too long to answer) TIA my visit to Dachau

Concentration Camp, I saw original lab notebooks of experiments designed to increase the survial rate of pilots downed above the cold waters of the North Sea. A noble cause.

Well I don't think so. The pilots missions were to bomb the cities of England. This was in turn to further the meglomaniac plans of the Fuhrer to create a european police state under his personal rule with all objectors murdered. Analysis of the aims of the research must not simply stop at the immediate result but through to the wider goals towards which the research was intended to contribute. In this context we see that the objective was not to save lives but to destroy them in the furtherance of a plan to enslave the entire population of Europe. spread,

easy employment.

I'm not a libertarian, or an anarcho-capitalist. I do, however, support rapid deployment, without restrictions, of strong crypto. Here's why: (1) It is impossible to stop these technologies; someone on the list recently reminded us that a bright fourteen year old could reproduce the basic functionality of PGP in a brief period of time. The mathematics of, say, RSA, are fairly basic. I think it's unreasonable to outlaw multiplication of prime numbers, don't you? (2) While these technologies allow people to violate the law, I have enough faith in humanity to believe that civilization won't collapse as a result. There have always been criminals, and there have always been revolutionaries. Only recently has "The State" been able to supress these forces without maintaining a physical presence. Crypto merely returns us to that default. An example of this is, for example, "What if terrorists are going to blow up a big important building, but we don't know which one?" Before wiretapping, and even today with groups which insist on physical presence in a secure location for planning, you had to infiltrate the group. This will still work. LEAs don't like this sort of activity because of the inherent risk for the infiltrator. That's not a good reason to limit these technologies. (3) These technologies also allow honest, law-abiding citizens to protect themselves from criminals, both within and outside the government. Industrial espionage can be defeated through strong crypto, for example. J. Edgar Hoover would have been powerless to harass Martin Luther King, jr. had MLK had access to strong crypto. Obviously, these aren't the only reasons to use strong crypto, and everybody will almost definitely disagree with them as I've described. But it's one answer, anyway. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jon Lasser <jlasser@rwd.goucher.edu> (410)494-3072 Visit my home page at http://www.goucher.edu/~jlasser/ You have a friend at the NSA: Big Brother is watching. Finger for PGP key.