Wind river

[Michael Anders]

@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