Re: US' NSA monitors all e-mail, telephone and FAXes in Europe

Harvey Newstrom (harv@gate.net)
Fri, 06 Feb 1998 12:11:36 -0500


It's not just governments playing games with security. One of my
clients is IBM Corp. They sold Lotus Notes systems to the Swedish
Government with high-level encryption. Normally, high-level encryption
is not legally exportable, but IBM got a special waiver from the U.S.
Government. Everybody was happy, until recently. The Swedes found out
that the way IBM got the waiver was to give the NSA a copy of all
decryption keys for every system they shipped. Thus, the U.S.
Government has decryption capability for all of the Swedish Government's
new computers. The Swedish Government is NOT happy about this, and does
not understand how this could be done without their knowledge or
consent. They currently are investigating, and are considering this a
breach of their national security by IBM Corp.
--
Harvey Newstrom <mailto:harv@gate.net>
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