From: Matt Blaze <mab@crypto.com>
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 13:31:15 +0800
To: Ernest Hua <hua@xenon.chromatic.com>
Subject: Re: NSA response to key length report
In-Reply-To: <199607190716.AAA20359@server1.chromatic.com>
Message-ID: <199607192110.RAA07548@crypto.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Ernest Hua <hua@xenon.chromatic.com> writes:
> 
> It sounds like most of their "counter-arguments" are just stalling tactics.
> 
> If you are a lawyer for someone you know is guilty, you still would choose
> to find every reason in the book to attack the prosecution's case.  Here we
> have precisely the same effect with the NSA.  Any tactical manuveur to keep
> stalling the impending collapse of ITAR.
> 
> (It is human .. er .. rather .. bureaucrat-esque to claim innocence in the
> face of overwhelming evidence of guilt.)

Particularly impressive is that our key length report was hardly
above criticism from several angles, but their rebuttal managed 
somehow to avoid them.

What I find most disturbing about this is that their report was
provided secretly to policymakers in the administration and in
Congress, without independent technical review that would have
quickly exposed the fallacy of the arguments.  I never would have
seen it had several of the recipients not faxed it to me.  This is
the first hard evidence I've seen of NSA providing anything less
than the highest quality technical analysis to other parts of the
government.  A non-specialist reader would be easily misled by the
technically dense, but completely irrelevant, "rebuttal".  It smacks 
of either ill-informed sloppiness, or, perhaps worse, self-serving  
disingenuous cynicism.  Either conclusion is scary, and, to me in
fact, quite surprising.

-matt