WE'RE UNDER ATTACK

[gtoal@an-teallach.com (Graham Toal)]

In article <9309180534.AA27719@longs.lance.colostate.edu> you write:
>We must try to determine whose rules we are playing by. Is this a
>customs investigation? Treasury Dept.?  The situation with NSA is that
>they don't really ever act directly, they always go through some other
>henchmen to do the dirty work. This smells like them. But the case of
>the NSA convening a grand jury does not appear to have a historical
>precedent. What's going on here?

Here's my guess: the NSA isn't actually behind this - it was just unfortunate
that Grady was getting up their nose at the time.  

Let's imagine someone who is an arse-licking toady and wants to keep in well
with the government.  Let's suppose he's the sort of person who, to paint
the personality type, would go around hassling ftp site managers getting them
to remove pgp.  Then imagine that the cheeky bastards promoting pgp taunt
him by offering it loudly from sites outside the US and there's nothing
he can do about it.  What does this person do now?  Has a quiet word with
his friends in the US Customs (you never know, he might have some connection
with the government and exporting, for all we can imagine...) and points
out as a loyal concerned citizen that a cryptographic munition has been
illegally exported.  He maybe even forwards them some postings by Grady
saying that he was planning to publish these programs (and Grady is well
known to publish his Moby Words through the Austin Code Works - anyone
who gets Byte can tell you that...)

If such a drittsekk came to the US Customs with such a story, I think
they'd be duty bound to investigate it; *especially* when all they'll
have heard until now is this persons highly one-sided view of the matter.

Now, *I* can't imagine for a minute that any of our cypherpunks or sci.crypt
readers would do such a thing, but then I always do tend to overestimate
the common sense of the net.educated public...

G