From: mike@fionn.lbl.gov (Michael Helm)
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 1996 04:27:59 +0800
To: Adam Shostack <jya@pipeline.com (John Young)
Subject: Re: NYT on Crypto Bills
In-Reply-To: <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>
Message-ID: <199603041810.KAA07446@fionn.lbl.gov>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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.