re licensing of public key implementations in article apr magnus acs ohio state edu jebright magnus acs ohio state edu james r ebright writes i guess we will have to wait for the time in the far future when everyone uses such good crypto that the nsa has no job then the agency will be disbanded and its files opened after the approprate historical delay you ve overlooked a fundamental truth both headcount and budget of any government agency are monotonic increasing functions given that truth you need to look for what the agency can do to occupy all those people and spend all that money when crypto is unbreakable perhaps they could talk the world s telephone companies into making equipment they could break into and tap maybe they could convince people that distributed computing was a good idea so that even the internal state of a process would be available for access by wiretapping maybe disclaimer all opinions expressed are my own of course carl ellison cme sw stratus com stratus computer inc m bkw tel fairbanks boulevard marlborough ma fax
