USA Today Against ITAR & GAK

[futplex@pseudonym.com (Futplex)]

I'm pleased to report that USA Today editorializes today (Tuesday, Oct. 24, 
1995) against both ITAR and GAK. 

They get the chronology of the SSL brute-forcing and PRNG seed prediction
attacks on Netscape Navigator backwards, but they get many other things right
in a fairly short editorial. I am certainly encouraged by this development.
Someone at USA Today definitely got the message that the ITAR are a large
obstacle to net security in the U.S.

Some particularly apropos quotations (from pg. 12A):
 
On ITAR:
	"[After the Netscape hacks] the perception of the Internet as 
	 insecure was indelible. That needn't be. Encryption software 
	 available right now is exponentially more powerful and could 
	 make code breaking virtually impossible. Its use is blocked
	 by government export regulations that make the programs 
	 difficult if not impossible to market, even for domestic 
	 purposes."

On GAK:
	"[...] key escrow [...] may sound reasonable, but apply that 
	 reasoning to more mundane areas of life. What the government
	 is saying is yes, you can put bars on your windows, locks on
	 your doors and put your jewelry in a safe, but you have to
	 give us the keys and the combination because you might be a
	 crook."

That phrasing sounds rather familiar....

	"The [GAK] system -- which the FBI and the Commerce Department
	 declined to defend in an opposing view to this editorial [...]"

Now I find that surprising. Since when does the FBI not even try to justify
Clipper and its descendants in the newspapers ?

For foreign readers, I'll note that USA Today has easily the largest 
national circulation of any daily newspaper in the U.S.

[Letters to the editor can be emailed to usatoday@clark.net; they want you
 to give your snail-mail address and home and work phone numbers so they
 can check your identity.]

-Futplex <futplex@pseudonym.com>