Echelon-like...

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 02:28:26AM -0000, anonimo arancio wrote:
[..]

> But I am wondering if Cypherpunks have mentioned the 'obvious'.
> 
> The government knows exactly what it's doing. It wants to discourage the use of encryption by any means necessary, because of sheer numbers.
> Basically, the more messages that are encypted, the more hardware (and therefore $$$) will be needed to decrypt them.
> Therefore, the only way they can stay ahead of the game is to keep the numbers as low as possible, so they can continue to "outspend" the problem.
> This is, from their perspective, a perfectly reasonable approach to decrypting large numbers of messages, a small fraction of which may contain "interesting" information.
> 
> Is the above statement a) wrong, b) obvious c) mentioned previously on the cypherpunks boards, or d)"hey! We never thought of that"


B and C, extensively.

The US Government has pretty much given up on restricting crypto
exports.  There is just enough of a vestigial restriction there to
maintain the illusion that the government has a right to control crypto
exports.  If there was anything more, it would be challenged in court
and most likely get thrown out.  The government backed off on
previous challenges (Bernstein, Zimmerman) to avoid that.

Eric