Re: NYT on Crypto Bills

[mike@fionn.lbl.gov (Michael Helm)]

On Mar 4,  3:09pm, Adam Shostack wrote:
> 	Markoff shouyld know better than this.  There is a long
> history of business use of codes & ciphers, going back hundereds of
> years, and durring the heyday of the telegraph, there were fair size
> companies that created codebooks with (locally configurable)
> superencipherment systems for the market.

I thought that, for the most part, the telegraph systems described
above were to reduce cable charges (1 code word instead of a 15-word
sentence, a huge savings in those days).  Maybe it's the use to which
the encoding's put that's controversial, not the (idea of) encoding
itself.