February 02 Atlantic Monthly article - Losing the Code War

[P.J. Ponder]

The February issue of the magazine _The Atlantic Monthly_
has an article on page 33 entitled 'Losing the Code War' by Stephen
Budiansky.  This piece puts forth the notion that advances in modern
general purpose computers have given the edge to code makers over code
breakers, by allowing people to use harder encryption, eg with longer
keys.

The Atlantic's website (http://www.theatlantic.com) as of today lists the
January issue as the current issue, so the article isn't online yet.

There is a discussion of DES being cracked a few years ago, and the
article also talks about one time pads, Enigma machines, the Scarfo case,
the Clipper chip, and reported al Qaeda stego use.  Definitely not a
technical article, but it is interesting to see how the mainstream press
deals with the concepts and facilities of crypto.







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