"An effort in the Senate to revive that plan and include it in the anti-terrorism bill that was signed into law October 26 received little support and was withdrawn, and on much the same grounds -- that however powerful an intelligence tool code breaking was during its golden age, in World War II and the Cold War, the technical reality is that those days are gone. Code breaking simply cannot work the magic it once did."

Yawn. This article strikes me as yet another tired variant of the "Everything changed on September 11" lamentation. Besides, Whit Diffie already told us as much (way back in 1996!), when he spoke about the resurging importance of HUMINT.

I hope David Kahn, or at least Bruce Schneier, takes the time to draft a letter to The Atlantic about this. Use of the term "code breaking" in this context suggests that cryptanalysis is a game ... it's clear that cryptanalysis has changed a lot since WW II, but so has everything else related to technology, communications, and warfighting. To suggest that existing cryptosystems are impenetrable is to claim not only that specific mathematical conjectures, such as the discrete logarithm problem or the factoring problem, are actually NP-complete, but also that the real-world systems based on such math are implemented with abstract perfection.

The truth is that cryptanalysis has long relied on human factors. The Allies were getting nowhere with Enigma until they daringly boarded a rapidly sinking U-boat to recover an operational unit. In the absence of this chance occurrence, it's questionable the Bletchley folks could have enjoyed the same success.

Budiansky claims that PGP is "supplied with most computers." I find that hard to believe. With what package? Does Microsoft ship it with Outlook these days? The Outlook 2002 product guide doesn't even mention encryption, let alone PGP.

Most of the six messages on "Post & Riposte" support Bodiansky in general but criticize this article in particular.

The Atlantic | February 2002 | Losing the Code War | Budiansky