Forwarded From: "Jay D. Dyson" <jdysonat_private> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Courtesy of Cryptography List. Posted by Jonathan Gregg <jgreggat_private> http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/afternoon/0,1012,2044,00.html Fish & Barrel by Declan McCullagh For seven years the savviest of the online privacy mavens, a few dozen select cryptoscenti, have gathered in Washington, D.C. Held each June, the Electronic Privacy Information Center's annual encryption conference gave them a chance to kick back, catch up -- and, of course, bemoan the U.S. government's latest attempts to coerce everyone into using only data-scrambling software with backdoors for government surveillance. Sound obscure? Well, it was, for a while. But now, dozens of congressional hearings and millions of high-tech lobbying dollars later, the EPIC conference has outgrown its cozy origins on the top floor of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- so much so that today's conference had to be moved to a downtown hotel to accommodate the nearly 300 attendees. One thing that shows no signs of changing, though, is the positions of the hapless government representatives whom EPIC lines up on panel after panel so the audience (very politely, of course) can take potshots at them, like gleeful teens aiming their BB guns at a row of empty soda cans. Today was no exception. Top Justice Department official Robert Litt showed up to defend the controversial White House rule banning overseas sales of secure encryption products, but in response to a question admitted he had never read a crucial report by the National Research Council that said such rules were misguided. (Later, a Canadian crypto official said that even they had read the study and "like it very much.") At lunch, Jim Bidzos, president of RSA Data Security, offered the unsurprising prediction that no encryption legislation -- bad or good -- would pass Congress this year, and the only thing that will eliminate current export controls is near-irreversible harm to American companies when their unhindered overseas competitors gain the upper hand. "This policy is badly broken," Bidzos said. No need to decode that message. - --By Declan McCullagh/Washington http://www.epic.org/ http://pathfinder.com/netly/editorial/0,1012,931,00.html http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1722,00.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBNXyYuOe1NzV7EsRFAQGSXQQAmTZC5dcKsqWL18nhqW12PnL0PQ6rnqP0 vYpQmXIM0ahM1wa+v79agYg2Q3j1/oCoWhuaHwOZTdjG2OUOECgvCaQRe1WItWF1 EZog9zEAAEqTUh/rIMHdZUzvrjyRCc7NsBGBme52Zq41bpQ+RF8xU5fJxQ+E2bdh VKeO++V1lgA= =R5Ar -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Repent Security Incorporated [www.repsec.com]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 12:55:31 PDT