[4611] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Bernstein Opinion Up
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lenny Foner)
Thu May 6 18:56:35 1999
Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 18:40:05 -0400
From: Lenny Foner <foner@media.mit.edu>
To: karn@qualcomm.com
Cc: jya@pipeline.com, cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <199905062143.OAA26699@servo.qualcomm.com> (message from Phil
Karn on Thu, 6 May 1999 14:43:09 -0700 (PDT))
Cc: foner@media.mit.edu
Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 14:43:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: Phil Karn <karn@qualcomm.com>
I just read the opinion. These judges actually *got* it! Or at least
two of them did, judges Bright and Fletcher. There's some marvelous
stuff in their opinion, such as the observation that Bernstein's code
had more than a little political expression to it since by showing how
to turn a hash function (which isn't regulated) into a cipher (which
is) he meant to demonstrate the arbitrary and silly nature of the
regulations.
I agree. There -is- a little nit in that they seem to conflate
"low-level", "assembly language", and "machine code" as all being
exactly the same thing, with the implicit presumption that humans
never read or write assembly language and that only a "high-level"
language like C or Lisp might be appropriately protected as being
speech and not purely functional. This would seem to be a problem
for, e.g., a paper describing a fast assembly-language implementation
of a crypto algorithm, or indeed a paper which might talk about
architectural features of CPU's which might support crypto; such a
paper would necessarily have to have stretches of assembly language in
it, but clearly would be no less "expressive" for doing so. However,
this is a minor point.
I was also particularly amused by the severability argument and their
unwillingness to line-edit the regs...
