OECD policy: constructive comments?

["Robin Whittle" <firstpr@ozemail.com.au>]

The US, French and UK government policies on crypto control are 
stupid.

The OECD has a group of so-called experts who are likely to reach the 
same conclusion about how governements "must" have access to the 
content of criminal communications.

For a commented version of a leaked draft the OECD crypto guidelines, 
see my WWW site.  Recently I got some email from someone at the OECD 
who is on the secretariat working on this.  The didn't seem to mind 
me publishing the draft and they seemed to appreciate my comments.

These people seem to be in their own government circle - but if you 
can get through to them, at least some of them will listen.  They are 
likely to be intelligent, concerned people, but due to their lack of 
wide perspective (something they really should be working harder on, 
for sure) they may come up with some totally unrealistic policies.

In fact, most of the draft seems to be really good - it is only the 
last bit on law-enforcement access which is crook and this seems to 
be at odds with the rest of the draft.

It is no good complaining about them sitting in their bunker if we 
won't crawl out of ours.  If you have some constructive comments on 
the draft, let me know and I will put you in touch with the OECD 
secretariat.  

- Robin


> Date:          Thu, 5 Dec 1996 08:00:32 -0500
> From:          C Matthew Curtin <cmcurtin@research.megasoft.com>
> To:            cypherpunks@toad.com
> Subject:       Encryption policy challenged 

> http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,5909,00.html?dtn.head
> 
> "The Business Software Alliance, a powerful Washington trade
> organization, warned the White House that its encryption policy will
> fail if the government does not turn to the industry for guidance."
> 
> blah blah blah ...
> 
> Interesting how these polite requests from the SBA, et al, are going
> for such ridiculously low goals. Being able to export 56-bit symmetric
> cipher products... Why in the world go for such a low number when that
> is the absolute *best* that you can possibly get? And with such a
> small difference between 56 and 40 bits, there isn't really any room
> to haggle.
> 
> Duh.
> 
> -- 
> Matt Curtin  cmcurtin@research.megasoft.com  Megasoft, Inc   Chief Scientist
> http://www.research.megasoft.com/people/cmcurtin/   I speak only for myself.
> Hacker Security Firewall Crypto PGP Privacy Unix Perl Java Internet Intranet


. Robin Whittle                                               .
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