Re: NRC panel wants questions for Law Enforcement on crypto policy

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

| I collated all the questions into a large ungainly message and sent it
| to Herb Lin.  He has been after me to go back over it and make a more
| useful set of questions, which I haven't done yet.  He says they are
| meeting with the FBI in September and want to get questions to them in
| August (incorporating our ideas).  I've promised him I will get him the
| formatted list of questions by the end of next week.

	A question that might be interesting to add would be "Given
the intense difficulties in replacing the DES, why does Clipper have
an 80 bit key?  Wouldn't it make more sense to design a standard that
will at least resist brute force attacks for longer?"

	I understand there are difficulties in projecting computing
power that far ahead, as well as guessing at the actual improvement in
mathematical and cryptographic theory, but why not have a standard
with a 128 bit key?

Adam


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume