Enlightened commentary on Netizen.

[Anil Das <das@razor.engr.sgi.com>]

First, Rebecca Vesely has a special report, the main thrust
of which is that three firms being allowed to export 56 bit
encryption indicates flexibility on the part of the
government.

http://www.netizen.com/netizen/97/05/special2a.html

To top it off, here are two gems from the followup discussion.

http://www.netizen.com/cgi-bin/interact/replies_all?msg.37387

2. 56 ONLY A SLIGHTLY SMALLER JOKE
    Ric Allan (ricrok) on Wed, 5 Feb 97 11:53 PST

    If it takes a college student four hours to break
    a 40bit code it should take him/her about six 
    hours to do the same to 56bits. Then what excuses 
    are the government and its butt-kissing companies 
    going to give us for not allowing *real* coding?

4. 56bits will not take 6 hours to crack
    Piers Cawley (pdcawley) on Thu, 6 Feb 97 05:05 PST

    Rick seems to be missing the point about strong encryption -- the reason that DES/IDEA encryption
    is hard to crack is because the key system is based on the fact that factoring big numbers is a long,
    slow tedious process which gets exponentially harder as the length of the number increases. What this
    means is that it'll probably take the college student, ooh... 24 hours to crack a 56 bit key.

    However, the question has to be asked, why the fuck should we non US citizens go and buy
    cryptographic software that is deliberately coded to allow the US government to read our mail? 

--
Anil Das