The FBI wants to increase wiretapping and, with the NSA, to include back doors in any popular public cryptographic protocols.
Burdensome and useless cryptographic export restrictions will not secure our transmissions any more than back doors will help catch criminals. If one guy with a typewriter and an imagination can outwit the FBI for two decades, it is my suggestion that the NSA and FBI, rather than screwing the public out of their right to privacy, work on their weak points, which appear to be basic police work in both cases. Laziness on the part of government employees is no reason to give up our privacy.
Until law enforcement can master the technology they have to protect me from racist church burners, psychotic cults, and dangerous-gun-wielding fundamentalists, none of which appear to be particularly clever or intelligent, they can keep their hands off and out of any and all advanced privacy-enhancing technologies available now or in the future.
56-BIT ENCRYPTION IS VULNERABLE, SAYS ZIMMERMANN Philip Zimmermann, creator of Pretty Good Privacy encryption software, testified before a Senate subcommittee that, based on a 1993 presentation by Michael Wiener of Northern Telecom, it would be possible to build a machine for $1 million that could crack a message encrypted with the Data Encryption Standard and a 56-bit key in an average of 3.5 hours. A more powerful machine, costing about $10 million, could do it in 21 minutes, and a $100 million machine could bring the time down to two minutes. Zimmermann's testimony contradicted a recent statement by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno that even with a "top of the line supercomputer, decoding a 56-bit key would take over a year and the evidence would be long gone." At issue is whether the U.S. should permit the general-license export of 56-bit encryption products. (BNA Daily Report for Executives 27 Jun 96 A5)
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