[In his letter in your December issue,] Eric Krock sets up a false disjunction between the protection of individual liberties and the suppression of international terrorism. It is wrong to assume that US export restrictions can somehow keep strong encryption out of the hands of terrorists. Strong encryption software is available via anonymous FTP from sites outside the US, and slightly more ambitious hackers can find published algorithms for all the best known strong ciphers in textbooks that can be legally exported from the US. Anyone who wants to use strong encryption for nefarious purposes will find no obstacle to doing so in current US export restrictions.

The letter uses examples of the bombings of the Oklahoma City federal building and the World Trade Center, [but] in both of these cases encrypted messages played no part. In cases where encrypted messages did play a part in a terrorist act, such as the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, the encryption used was of a military nature supplied by unfriendly governments. There is no reason to suppose that US export restrictions would have had any effect on these real events.

The US government proposal that strong encryption be made available only if some key escrow service is provided that allows legitimate law enforcement agencies to have access to the keys... founders on the rock of mistrust. Who is to provide this escrow service? Why should an Internet user in Japan or China or Italy expect the US government to be a trustworthy escrow agent? Who is to adjudicate claims of legitimacy? No encryption method with backdoors or escrowed keys will be acceptable to the international Internet community.

[While] it is the nature of some technologies to be two-edge swords... we cannot put the genie back into the bottle. The terrorists already have encryption; isn't it time that legitimate law-abiding users should have it as well?

Hank Cohen

Regarding the review of Marketing on the Information Superhighway [Dec., page 44], as the marketer in Japan, I would like to respond. Your reviewer doesn't seem to have fully grasped the main point of this training kit: "that marketing psychology is more important than computer technology." Our product teaches how to induce potential customers to want to buy a product. While there are thousands of attractive and technically well produced homepages, very few get to the bottom line: clinching the sale. What this course teaches is that, no matter what the medium, unless the message is pitched appropriately at the right audience, then the ultimate objective of all marketing - to clinch a sale - cannot be achieved.

Some marketers are misplaced in thinking that good signposting of homepages will lead to success. [This] is a distribution function, not a marketing technique. And many homepage creators fail their clients because they create pages that achieve high "hit rates" but end up with low response/sales rates.

The publishers of the international version of our program have not signposted their Web page(http://www.powerup.com.au/~getready/), preferring instead to use direct mail and space advertising to announce their existence to their target market: marketing professionals and entrepreneurs who don't have much time to surf the Internet but who snatch a read of Computing Japan in the air or late at night.

A couple of additional points about the program:

• NTSC and PAL versions of the video are available.
• There are two versions of the program - the full package and a scaled-down version - and both are supported by a bonus five-hour audio program focused on direct marketing techniques.

Phil Ingram
Managing Director, Ingram Int'l

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