The assertion occasionally comes up that since the NSA cannot legally eavesdrop on Americans, it outsources to the UK or one of the other Echelon countries. It turns out that that's forbidden, too -- see Section 2.12 of Executive Order 12333 (http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html)
Now, I'm not saying that the government or the NSA always follows the rules; I'm simply saying that that loophole is pretty obvious and is (officially, at least) closed. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com