Whitfield Diffie Quotes
We have experienced an utter explosion in investigative techniques. Walk the streets, look at the cameras! They are now recognising people automatically from photos; we have DNA fingerprinting, infrascan photos that can identify you from the veins in your face.
Diffie, Whitfield. Keynote Address. Infosecurity Europe, 28 Apr. 2010, London.
In 2006, the George W. Bush administration had contracted with Boeing for a $5 Billion network of motion sensors and camera towers on part of the Mexican border. This was after a 2004 previous contract for $2.5 billion had failed. The system did not work very reliably, often warning of border crossers that turned out to be small animals. The system was too complex for the staff of the border patrol to handle and unlike the military did not bring in or train highly technical personnel to replace the regular border patrol agents who were not very well educated and had a hard time learning the now digital technology. The Bush administration spent the first $1 Billion of the $5 Billion project when further failures finally persuaded the administration to end this failed scheme despite the President's statement herein.
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie, ForMemRS, is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.
