From: "Michael E. Marotta" <MERCURY@lcc.edu>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 93 06:48:58 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Pyrrhus Cracks RSA?
Message-ID: <6E4CCAA7E0204AD3@sleepy.egr.msu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


CAN THE GOVERNMENT BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?  
by mercury@well.sf.ca.us <Michael E. Marotta> 
 
Long ago, Captain Kirk and his crew stumbled on a Nazi planet.  
A Federation dude found them earlier and decided to industrialize 
their society by the "most efficient" means possible.  No one was 
surprised at this.  In "Mirror, Mirror" Spock-2 predicts that the 
Evil Federation will collapse.  This was also accepted without 
comment.  Star Trek, perhaps more than any other mass media 
production, reflects the American psyche.  Americans, of course, 
are humans.  Human nature accepts dualities easily.  On the one 
hand, people admire the conqueror.  On the other, the historical 
evidence is never denied: empires always collapse.  (Look at what 
remains: farming, writing, arithmetic, ships and chariots, 
clothing,...  These are useful.) 
 
Not so long ago, Ayn Rand showed that evil only triumphs when 
good people work f+ it.  When good people do nothing, evil 
fails.
 
Cypherpunks know that centralized systems are inefficient, yet 
they fear the NSA.  Cypherpunks know that government employees 
are slugabeds, yet they fear the NSA.  Cypherpunks know that 
qinnovation and enterprise are the antithesis of socialism, yet 
they fear the NSA.  They don't fear that the NSA will kick in 
their doors and shoot them in a cybernetic Kristallnacht or burn 
t(their homes the way the Romans and Mongols did to Carthage and 
Samarkand.  (Waco comes to mind, here.)  No, the Cypherpunk is 
afraid that the government has "powerful computers" capable of a 
"brute force attack" on their algorithms. 
 
It may be true.  Having  Archimedes in town only bought the 
Syracusans time, it didn't assure them victory.  The US Govt 
drafted 90% of the physicists in the world, gave them virtually 
unlimited resources and in five years, it had atomic bombs.  The 
American and Soviet governments proved that they could harness 
nineteenth century technology and shoot things into space.  
(According to Willey Ley what made their rockets possible was the 
pumps which came from fire trucks.)  Ask "anyone" and they will 
tell you that World War Two brought us nuclear power, spaceships, 
radar, television, the transistor, the computer, canned food, and 
recycling.  In fact, it brought none of these.  They already 
existed.  Absent the person with an idea, the Government would 
still be beating farmers with rods for not giving up their goats 
and grain. (The pharoah's toughs used sticks with sharp stones in 
them until bronze came along.  Later, their bronze weapons were 
chopped up by people with iron.  Why didn't the pharoah's priests 
discover bronze and iron?) 
 
Both William Friedman and the man he detested, Herbert O. 
Yardley, despaired in wartime for the lack of people with 
"cipher sense."  An infinite number of clerks with typewriters 
could not break the simplest code.  The government enlisted 
people who liked crossword puzzles, mathematicians, polyglots, 
anyone and everyone who played with symbols.  It made no 
difference.  There was no way to tell who had "cipher sense" and 
there was no way to TEACH it.
 
Friedman was an obsessive-compulsive who worked himself into a 
neurotic frenzy, breaking the Purple Code.  Turing delivered the 
"Bombe" that broke Enigma. 
 
You know the people who could break DES, RSA, PGP, etc.  Shamir 
unpacked Diffie's knapsack.  What is most probable, is that these 
ciphers will stand for some unforeseeable time until someone who 
may not be born yet comes along and breaks them all as an idle 
{exercise on her way to greatness in another field. 
 
But the NSA?  No way, Jose.  They might be nerds who hacked some 
code at 3 am.  But you put them on a salary and benefits in a 
pyramid, then tell them not to talk about their work, and you 
thwart whatever creativity they had.  The NSA can kill you.  But 
t({they can never out-think you. 
 
 
qiM{iW{x