[514] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
followup written testimony to House Judiciary Committee
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Phil Karn)
Tue Apr 8 03:34:34 1997
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 06:32:45 +0000 (UTC)
From: Phil Karn <karn@qualcomm.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net
Reply-To: karn@qualcomm.com
As some of you may have heard, on March 20 I testified to the House
Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Courts & Intellectual Property,
in favor of the SAFE bill (HR695) to deregulate encryption exports.
The first panel included three government witnesses. I accumulated
such a long list of misstatements and factual errors in their
testimony that I spent a fair bit of my own time rebutting it. For
example, did you know that outside of the DoD there is no "Key
Management Infrastructure" to assure users that the public keys they
use belong to who you think they do? Neither did I. Did you know that
assuring users of the authenticity of a public key entails archiving
every user's private key in the KMI? Neither did I.
One can only imagine what these guys say in closed sessions where
there are no members of the public to keep them honest.
I also obtained permission to submit followup written testimony for
the record. This is now up on my web page as
<http://www.qualcomm.com/people/pkarn/export/followup.html>
--Phil
