From: Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org>
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 94 16:23:52 PDT
To: eff-activists@eff.org
Subject: ****Customs Goes For Encryption -- And It's Not Clipper 07/11/94 (fwd)
Message-ID: <199407112323.TAA27386@eff.org>
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Posted-Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 16:44:31 -0400
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From: newsbytes@clarinet.com (NB-WAS)
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Subject:  ****Customs Goes For Encryption -- And It's Not Clipper 07/11/94
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Date: 11 Jul 94 19:19:57 GMT
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WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A., 1994 JUL 11 (NB) -- The US Customs Service
has picked Information Resource Engineering (IRE) of Baltimore, Md.,
to supply encryption technology to protect Drug Enforcement
Agency information traveling on telephone and computer networks in the
Pacific Rim.

But Customs won't be using the Clipper encryption technology the
Clinton Administration and the National Security Agency is pushing.
"Clipper simply is not available," Anthony Caputo, chief executive
officer of IRE told Newsbytes. "Clipper has been approved for
government agencies, but there just isn't much equipment out there
yet."

So the US Customs will be using IRE's technology, which uses its
proprietary Atlas encryption algorithm and meets the National
Institute of Standards and Technology's Digital Encryption Standard
or DES for short.

"DES products are the only thing you can buy today," said Caputo. "We
expect to see Clipper become fairly widely used and we will have
Clipper versions of our systems available when that happens."

IRE was founded in 1983 by former crytologists at the National
Security Agency who wanted to develop technology to make encryption
easy and inexpensive. The company has focused on the banking industry,
providing security for corporate wire transfers.

Caputo says that Citibank, J.P. Morgan & Co., Chase Manhattan, Bankers
Trust and Banc One are using IRE systems, as are AT&T and the US
Treasury Department.

"The government is far ahead of private industry on electronic
commerce," Caputo said. "Banks are just getting around to it. One way
people will use the information superhighway is for electronic
commerce, and we are the best positioned company in the world for this
development."

(Kennedy Maize/19940711/Contact: Anthony Caputo 410-931-7500)