Thoughts on the proposal

[Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>]

>It is entirely possible that Clinton, if he understands anything at
>all about this proposal, sincerely thinks that he's helping the cause
>of personal privacy. Consider that his entire education on the
>subject of cryptography probably consisted of a 5 minute briefing
[rest elided]

Phil points out indirectly in this post one of the very clever tactics
used by the PR people on the wiretap side:

	They presented strong hardware cryptography and the backdoor
	as inextricably linked.

I've gone through some of the press coverage on the chip from last
weekend and their argument basically goes like this: "This is stronger
than most cryptography currently existing.  And it also lets us spy on
the BAD people!"  Now the first claim is true and irrelevant, since
most stuff is not encrypted.  And the second claim is presented without
mentioning that you can make strong crypto without backdoors.

Therefore, one educational goal must be that strong cryptography is
possible in hardware which doesn't have backdoors.  For press
coverage, the announcement of a new hardware device with longer keys
and no backdoor could point out this difference and could get press
coverage by explicitly denying the gov't claims.  I would suggest a
triple-keyed DES chip would satisfy this nicely and be very quick to
engineer.

Eric