Feds have lost battle against encryption

[Phil Karn]

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