From the LA Times story

[cme@ellisun.sw.stratus.com (Carl Ellison)]

Robert Lee Hotz did a good job with this one -- except he tripped over my
favorite soapbox, as do most people.

Is he on the list?  Does anyone know how to reach him?

He wrote: "Not so many years ago, powerful encryption techniques were the
monopoly of military and intelligence agencies."

If this was true, it was for a short span of years -- perhaps 1932 to about
1975 -- but even then, Vernam's one-time-tape was published in 1920 and you
can't get any stronger than that.

What *was* true is that the gov't agencies and the press made it sound like
real encryption was the property of the governments while we peons played
around with simple substitution preserving word separation.

I wish more people would read the history chapters of Kahn...especially the
one about the dominance of the amateurs (in the early polyalphabetic days).

Ah, well.....


 - Carl