Open Source's Role in Lowering Export Restrictions

Posted by timothy on Monday March 25, 2002 @10:55AM from the free-flow-of-bits dept.

Bozo points to this article (PDF) "from the latest issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. It mentions the role of Open Source software in the U.S. government's backing off on export restrictions on cryptography. Here is a quote from the article: 'Open-source software has taken its place as a major element in the software marketplace. The consequence is a general decrease in the controllability of software and,in particular,a serious threat to effectiveness of the government efforts to stop the export of software containing strong cryptography.'"

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Its more sinister than that by Lord+Hugh+Toppingham · 2002-03-25 11:24 · Score: 1, Interesting

The reason the govt does not care about strong crypto is that it almost certainly has figured out how to crack it. Either they have a quantum computer somewhere or more likely an enormous beowulf cluster of E10K Suns that can brute force almost anything. Or maybe they have finally figured out how to factor large prime numbers like Bill Gates predicted.