[3121] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
re: Top Pentagon official declares no one has a right to secrecy.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Serge E. Hallyn)
Fri Jul 31 10:39:56 1998
From: "Serge E. Hallyn" <hallyn@CS.WM.EDU>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 21:48:46 -0400
To: cryptography@c2.net
Here's the actual quote from his speech:
(http://jya.com/dod072198.htm)
> But I'd also ask American business not to make a campaign out of just trying
> to bust through export controls as though somehow there was a God-given,
> inherent right to send the strongest encryption to anybody in the world, no
> matter who they are. I don't agree with that. I will never agree with that.
> The last thing I'm going to agree to is that American encryption gets used by
> terrorists overseas without any effort on our part to control that.
While we still disagree with that, this is very different from what the article
implied was said.
More importantly, when asked whether export controls aren't worthless since
anyone with a brain can write crypto, he answered:
> No, I don't agree with that because it isn't just a smart guy thinking up an
> algorithm and putting it on a PC. You know, it's creating the infrastructure
> for a security environment that that encryption rides on. That turns out to
> be much more demanding than you think. After all, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)
> is out on the net, right? There aren't that many people that are able to
> pick up -- you just can't set up PGP between you and somebody else. And if
> you do, it's a good thing to look at.
-serge
