From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 04:33:58 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: IBM sues critics?
Message-ID: <1.5.4.32.19970614201321.009a8b38@pop.pipeline.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Secret Squirrel wrote:
>According to a usually reliable contact in a position to know, IBM Friday
>filed a liable suit against the 11 authors of the study
>titled "The risks of key recovery, key escrow and trusted third-party
>encryption" plus their employers and the Centere for Democracy and
>Technology, which sponsored the report.  According to my contact, IBM
>feels that the report directly targets their own key recovery system,
>and falsely implies that it isn't reliable.  They are asking for
>unspecified damages.


If this report is true it's worth taking a look at IBM's policy paper
"The need for a global cryptographic policy framework" to 
understand why the key study report is such a threat to
Blue's global market strategy:

   http://www.ibm.com/security/html/pp_global.html

IBM's economic incentive to attack the report is substantial, not
least because it hopes to garner the lion's share of global GAK --
not that that's news.