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.)


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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.

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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".

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On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, Carl Ellison wrote:

> -----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".
> 
ubiquitious

but maybe that isnt simple