re new encryption in article strnlghtc wc z erw netcom com strnlght netcom com david sternlight writes psionic wam umd edu whose parenthesized name is either an unfortunate coincidence or casts serious doubt on his bona fides posts a message in which he seems willing to take the word of a private firm about which he knows little that their new encryption algorithm is secure and contains no trapdoors while seemingly distrusting that of the government about clipper i have a couple reasons why i would be more likely to trust this algorithm the algorithm will be made totally public once it is patented the keys will not be escrowed of course if either of these is not true i will not use this new algorithm since i have never seen this new algorithm i have no idea how secure it is yet i suppose it depends on how paranoid one wishes to be but how does the writer know the firm isn t for example an nsa front for purposes of this message how do we know psionic isn t i don t suggest that but post this to point out that there is a class of speculation that has no more truth value without lots of hard evidence than the contrary one by the way if psionic had said in lower case letters that the firm claims there was no back door i d have no problem with that phrasing i can t make any judgements about the algorithm itself yet but i do notice that the creators of this algorithm are being more open about how the thing works and is willing to make it public showing that after a bit of scrutiny any weaknesses will probably be revealed while we don t know about clipper doug holland doug holland anyone who tries to take away my freedom holland cs colostate edu of speech will have to pry it from my pgp key available by e mail cold dead lips
