Re: [sg] platoon stuff and combat engineers

At 2:44 PM -0400 6/25/02, Roger Books wrote:
>
>There's a saying in the computer industry,
>"Security by obscurity isn't".  If your equipment can't
>handle inspection by the enemy then it is pretty
>worthless.  It will eventually all boil down to good
>software encryption.  If I have a public/private key
>setup equivalent to what we can do today my military
>equipment can be compatible with my civilian equipment
>and everything will be wonderful.  I key in the public
>keys of the units I want to talk to and the communication
>is secure.
>
>The problem is most governments don't want their civilians
>to have truly secure communications.

The further extrapolation of this is that you can't make good crypto 
math secret. People will build systems that are sufficiently secure. 
PGP is a good example. The Open Source community is pretty closely 
aligned with the hacker community.

Or they'll buy them from people who do make them. Look at the slow 
downward spiral of US made secure network hardware sales over seas 
because of the NSA's finger in every exported crypto pie.
-- 
--
----------------------------------------------------------------
- Ryan Montieth Gill			     '01 Honda Insight -
- rmgill@SPAmindspring.com			    '85 CB700S -
- ryan.gill@SPAMturner.com		 '76 Chevy Monte Carlo -
- www.mindspring.com/~rmgill		       '72 Honda CB750 -
-				      '60 Daimler FV701H Mk2/3 -
-				   '42 Daimler Scout Car Mk II -
-	      I speak not for CNN, nor they for me	       -
----------------------------------------------------------------
-    Smart ID cards in the US, Smart ID cards in Hong Kong,    -
-		      what is the difference?		       - 
----------------------------------------------------------------
-  C&R-FFL  /  Protect your electronic rights!	  \ EFF-ACLU   -
- SAF & NRA/  Join the EFF!  http://www.eff.org/   \ DoD #0780 -