Thank you! Don't forget to confirm subscription in your email.
Whitfield Diffie —
American
Scientist
born on June 05, 1944,
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography... (wikipedia)
Lots of people working in cryptography have no deep concern with real application issues. They are trying to discover things clever enough to write papers about.
People meet in bars after work all over the world and talk about the great problems of life and death and the world and politics and they don't take themselves seriously. They can do nothing else except chat about these things in bars after work.
Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.
It's simply unrealistic to depend on secrecy for security in computer software. You may be able to keep the exact workings of the program out of general circulation, but can you prevent the code from being reverse-engineered by serious opponents? Probably not. The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets.
I thought cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people-that if you encrypted your files, you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files.