Today's Quotable Notes

[fergp@sytex.com (Paul Ferguson)]

Today's "Notable quote" -
 
"... I have to say up front I don't speak for the CIA and this
is just me.  I can tell you I did my doctoral work studying
Soviet-East European personal computing.  I have seen export
controls and all that close at hand, and actually kicked the
tires and things and all that.  I can say I agreed nearly
100% with what Mr. Diffie said, up until he said something
that surprised me, in that this room didn't shout it down.
That was when he said information is less dangerous than
physical things.  Good God! If you believe that, I'll give
you a choice.  I can go to your school district and give out
one hit of PCP, or I can cover the area with instructions on
how to make it.  All I'd ask you to keep in mind is to have
some sympathy for the foreign policy-niks who know that, in a
sort of frustrated air, when it's hard to move information
around, it's unlikely that someone can even get an atomic
bomb plan, despite the fact that we've got tens of thousands
in both the former Soviet Union and in the United States.
But I would fear someone giving out the Princeton
dissertation and broadcasting it over the nets to all and
sundry in that form -- now, given plutonium, we can make a
bomb.  So, information is a dangerous thing, in the right
hands.  I think we're all selling ourselves short if we think
information is an unempowered commodity.
 
All that said, I have to agree with everything else.
Cryptography is not magic, it's math, and DES is not only
here, it's on a server in Helsinki, so we have to live with
the fact that information moves around.  We may want to be
sympathetic to the fact that there are people, in fact people
without the tools that we all have here, trying to enact the
current and past foreign policy.  Help educate them, help
tell them why these things are happening, but realize that
we're disrupting a lot of things real fast."
 
-- Ross Stapleton, Central Intelligence Agency
 
  "WHO HOLDS THE KEYS?"
     Friday, March 20, 1992
 
     Chair: Dorothy Denning, Georgetown University
 
     Panel: Jim Bidzos, RSA Data Security
            David Bellin, Pratt Institute
            John Gilmore, Cygnus Support
            Whitfield Diffie, SunSoft, Inc.
            John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Paul Ferguson               |  "Government, even in its best state,
Network Integrator          |   is but a necessary evil; in its worst
Centreville, Virginia USA   |   state, an intolerable one."
fergp@sytex.com             |      - Thomas Paine, Common Sense
 
Type bits/keyID   Date       User ID
pub  1024/1CC04D 1993/03/15  Paul Ferguson <fergp@sytex.com>
  Key fingerprint =  EE D2 93 7D 04 6D C6 05  AC 36 AD 9D 8E 4F 41 58