re screw the people crypto is for hard core hackers spooks only in article r ausinni senator bedfellow mit edu jfc athena mit edu john f carr writes the chip and algorithm are classified if you reverse engineer it and tell people you are likely to go to jail i don t find this a credible argument for two reasons one you have supplied below unless i care about entering the usa at any time in the future eg the taiwanese backyard cloners who btw have been known to decap custom silicon and reproduce it on daughterboards when pirating high profit arcade machines and the like who wouldn t care less i am not going to care much about us confidentiality am i only people like the real me who does care about travelling to various countries for business reasons will sit up and follow laws like this but i would contend that we re not the main threat i also have grave doubts whether an algorythm widely distributed in silicon could possibly be called classified it s like handing out military secrets to the whole world in envelopes marked don t open me i can imagine several credible defences which could be employed if it came to a trial one would be the stupidity of the government s actions perhaps some foreign governments or corporations could help us out by cracking the system outside the usa the us government could probably stop importation of clone hardware but a software implementation should be practical amusing thought could they have employed an algorythm which is infeasable for a fast software implementation but which is easy in custom hardware in des the extensive use of permutation tables trivial in hardware you just swap bus lines but relatively slow in software have had a big effect on the speed difference between hardware and software implementations of that cipher indeed i suspect that lucifer s designers were well aware that it would be and approved certain algorythms usually parallel search algorythms can be very slow in software yet can fly in custom hardware i have no proof of their employment in clipper it is pure conjecture however as a software implementation of this cipher is something that its designers would have been trying to avoid at all costs then the inclusion of such techniques seems credible hmmm i also wonder what intergraph thinks about the use of the name clipper for this device ian farquhar phone office of computing services fax macquarie university nsw also australia email ifarqhar laurel ocs mq edu au
