Re: Idle question...

[Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>]

| Now, all I need is for you guys to explain coherently *why* it's a
| good coup and what the political implications are, and I'll feed the
| story to the UK press.  (I don't think anyone here has it yet...)

	It is a coup because it means that codes released to the
public do get reverse engineered.  The release of A5 bodes poorly for
Skipjack.  If the NSA wants Skipjack to remain secret, they can not
release it, in hardware or software.

	Cyphers to be used by the public will be studied and
understood.  The public no longer trusts governments to be honest.  In
the USA, this is a result of our free press printing things like the
Pentagon papers, where the government documented the fact that it lied
to us, systematically, for years.

	We do not trust the NSA, the ATF, or the DEA with our privacy.
They have repeatedly shown they will try to push the boundaries of
what is acceptable to get at people they don't like.  Just ask CISPES,
the Branch Dividians, or Rev. Aceyne (sp?) Williams widow.

Adam


(CISPES is the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador,
a left wing group working in support of the revolutionaries of El
salvador.  The FBI monitored, infiltrated, and harrassed them for 5
years with no evidence that they were breaking any law.  The Davidians
everyone knows.  Rev. Williams (age 77) was killed by Boston drug
police who burst into the wrong apartment, threw him to the floor, and
gave him a heart attack.  (In the newspapers Thanksgiving Day, 1993))

-- 
Adam Shostack 				       adam@bwh.harvard.edu

Politics.  From the greek "poly," meaning many, and ticks, a small,
annoying bloodsucker.