offered its own cryptographic cure-all, the Clipper Chip.
Cryptography is being discussed openly and publicly, and practiced
openly and publicly. It is passing from the hands of giant secretive
bureaucracies, to the desktop of the individual. Public-key
cryptography, in particular, is a strange and novel form of
cryptography which has some very powerful collateral applications and
possibilities, which can only be described as bizarre, and possibly
revolutionary. Cryptography is happening, and happening now.
It often seems a truism in science and technology that it takes
twenty years for anything really important to happen: well,
Whitfield Diffie was publishing about public-key cryptography in 1975.
The idea, the theory for much of what will be discussed today was
already in place, theoretically, in 1975. This would suggest a target
date of 1995 for this issue to break permanently out of the arid world
of theory, and into the juicy, down-and-dirty real world of politics,
lawsuits, and money. I rather think that this is a likely scenario.
Personally, I think the situation's gonna blow a seam. And by
choosing to attend this EFF and EFF-Austin conference in September
1993, you are still a handy two years ahead of the curve. You can
congratulate yourself!
Why do I say blow a seam? Because at this very moment, ladies
and gentlemen, today, there is a grand jury meeting in Silicon Valley,
under the auspices of two US federal attorneys and the US Customs
Service. That grand jury is mulling over possible illegality,
possible indictments, possible heaven-knows-what, relating to supposed
export-law violations concerning this powerful cryptography
technology. A technology so powerful that exporting cryptographic
algorithms requires the same license that our government would grant
to a professional armaments dealer. We can envision this federal
grand jury meeting, in San Jose California, as a kind of dark salute
to our conference here in Austin, a dark salute from the forces of
the cryptographic status quo. I can guarantee you that whatever you
hear at this conference today, is not gonna be the last you hear about
this subject.
I can also guarantee you that the people you'll be hearing from
today are ideal people to tell you about these issues. I wrote a book
once, partly about some of these people, so I've come to know some of
them personally. I hope you'll forgive me, if I briefly wax all
sentimental in public about how wonderful they are. There will be
plenty of time for us to get all hardened and dark and cynical later.
I'll be glad to help do that, because I'm pretty good at that when I
put my mind to it, but in the meantime, today, we should feel lucky.
We are lucky enough to have some people here who can actually tell us
something useful about our future. Our real future, the future we can
actually have, the future we'll be living in, the future that we can
actually do something about.
