From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 18:16:15 +0800
To: declan@well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Subject: Re: How I Would Ban Strong Crypto in the U.S.
Message-ID: <199607170719.AAA29383@cygnus.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 02:29 PM 7/16/96 -0500, Declan wrote:
>The emerging consensus is, in fact, nonexistant.
...
>Michael writes:
>>On Sun, 14 Jul 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
>>> So, who is in this "emerging consensus"?
>>>
>>Foreign governments?
>>(Process of elimination, not inside info...)

A consensus means that everybody more or less agrees.
If I were looking for a group of people that more or less
all agreed that governments needed access to all
encrypted material within their grasp, I'd probably 
look for heads of governments, and counter-intelligence
and internal-security organs of government, and assume
that the spying-on-other-government organs of government
won't mind because they can take care of their own crypto...

As far as businesses go, the closest to a consensus I've
seen is that some vendors think they can make money selling
GAK tools, and some others don't really care governments
can read the data their customers transmit as long as
the government doesn't scare customers away.  And then there
are the folks whose current encryption is so wimpy that
40-bit-RC4 is a big step up, and they don't mind much either.

As y'all have said, it's bogus, and for government to claim
otherwise is really shoddy and dishonest, but hey, that's
government for you....

#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs
#				Confuse Authority!