From: remail@tamsun.tamu.edu
Date: Sat, 28 Aug 93 02:36:04 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: NSA & the Crypto-Zionist Myth of "Public Key"!
Message-ID: <9308280932.AA03052@tamsun.tamu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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>I'm rather surprised that the most significant piece of evidence in favor of
>the "NSA has cracked PGP" theory is that no one's put a bullet through Phil
>Zimmerman's head.  

Excuse me, but I'm getting tired of this silly paranoia.  NSA
is not Evil Incarnate Central, and we are not fighting a Valiant War 
We Are Fated to Lose.  The NSA are a  bunch of Americans who went
to school & college with the rest of us, and share our communities
with us.  Most of them joined NSA to fight totalitarian Communism, and 
most of them are sympathetic with values most Americans share when they 
bother to think about them, like freedom, privacy, etc.  Sure, NSA has
been caught up in the Cold War habits of secrecy, bureaucracy, and
an ingrained habit to control information.  It's also almost surely
caught up in the same kind of bureaucratic incompetence we see
in the rest of the U.S. Federal government (most of the DoD, the space 
programs, the BATF, the FBI, etc.)  Does a $40+ crypto-voice-chip with 
an obvious trap door look like Malicious Plot to Destroy All Strong
Crypto and Take Over The World, or does it look like an
a half-competent, half-hearted attempt to retain Cold War era 
capabilities they had gotten used to?

NSA is going through the same crisis of goals as the rest of
the Cold War establishment.  Their mission, if they have any left at
all, has changed radically, and they know it.  While it
may be "in the best interest of NSA" to maintain control over
strong crypto, that's only a superficial analysis at one level.
NSA employees are also Americans, community members, family
members, etc.  They don't typically go around murdering hackers
they don't like.  Nor would that accomplish anything for them --
RSA was published internationally long ago, and PGP is now
scattered at sites all over the world, with new versions being
hacked on in nearly a dozen countries.   

The biggest problem I've encountered talking to various
people about implementing encryption is that they think
cypherpunks are a bunch of paranoid nuts, so only paranoids
would want to do things like use digital cash for their
semi-legal barter schemes.  Your expression of surprise that 
the NSA hasn't offed Phil Zimmerman just confirms their suspicions.
How can I convince them that cryptography is not just for paranoids?
The rest of us are concerned about things like protecting and
enhancing our privacy and freedom, and there's nothing silly
or paranoid about that.

But now that you mention it -- Shamir does operate out of Tel 
Aviv.  Obviously he built RSA with a hole in it, and NSA is the
main arm of the Crypto-Zionist conspiracy of Jewish Planetary Hegemony!  
And he didn't publish "Differential Cryptanalysis of the DES" until
non-Zionist bankers got ahold of DES.  It's all clear now!

> I think that, personally, the public-key stuff's gotta have some sort 
> of a hole in it that nobody's thought of yet outside of spook central.

I think your head has to have some sort of a hole in it.  Perhaps the
NSA's work?