From: Secret Squirrel <nobody@secret.squirrel.owl.de>
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 03:48:26 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: IBM sues critics?
Message-ID: <19970614184538.11070.qmail@squirrel.owl.de>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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.

This means IBM is suing such people as Matt Blaze, Whitfield
Diffie, and Ronald Rivest, along with AT&T, Sun, Microsoft, and MIT
over the question of whether its key recovery system really works.
Considering that truth is a defense and the details of the
IBM system could be part of the defense's evidence, it should be an
interesting trial to say the least.

I have not seen the actual court papers and really have no idea
whether my contact is totally accurate.  Can anyone confirm the details?
I just read the study in question, and it sounds like IBM is totally
out of line and trying to intimidate its critics with threats of expensive
if frivolous lawsuits. On the other hand, some of the parties named
in the suit (Microsoft, AT&T) have their own armies of lawyers
to defend themselves, so it's hard to be sure of what's going on here.

I think the report is still at www.crypto.com or www.cdt.org.