@rjh thanks for your earnest answer to my sloppy and somewhat provocative post. > > > This doesn't make any sense to me. > > Makes perfect sense to me, once you understand three things: > > (a) at one point all the good crypto came out of either the US, UK, > or France,
I have to concede that I mostly agree with you. While i think the most dangerous current threat to our freedom and democracy is ubiquitous eavesdropping and spoofing by NSA, GCHQ and their likes, I admit US scientists also gave us the means to defend against it(strong cryptography). After reading an Scientific American Article about asymmetric cryptography by Adleman (not the original one in 1977, but a later one from the 1990ies ;-) I was fascinated. Then I heard about the issues around export restrictions and immediately sat down and coded it as an act of a physicists self respect. For me the claim to "own some mathematics" by an administration is pure hybris and ignorance. My little exercise didn't get any momentum back then and I ceased to pursue that any further. And yes, if you want to discuss matters of cryptography seriously, there are hardly any quality posts in german language. I have some trust in the strength of the opposition against ubiquitous government surveillance within the US and hope they will overcome current antidemocratic moves. Presumably and sadly the opposition against such tendencies is weaker in germany. If you google "open source elliptic curve cryptography" you will find my current activities regarding cryptography. You might notice that the softwares menus as well as the documentation is held almost completely in english language. One reason is to keep dumb german nationalistic morons off. In my opinion the current behavior of the US soup letter agencies nourishes dumb nationalistic anti-us tendencies in other countries including mine! I don't want to be forced into an alliance with nationalistic people. The US judicial system should IMHO no longer let people, who lie to congress under oath, go unharmed and pursue people, telling the truth, with all might. Please apologize me having gone somewhat off topic here.... > (c) laws and regulations change so slowly they make glaciers look swift. agreed. Probably my (the german) administration isn't any better in this aspect. I respect you for defending your (the us) administration, yet in my opinion both our administrations deserve some bashing once in a while for excessive ignorance and/or sluggishness. Cheers, Michael Anders _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users