Here's the problem: because the US government has outlawed the export of industrial-strength encryption, firms seeking to do business abroad find themselves without trustworthy security options once they leave US boundaries. How can companies in the information and networking business, such as Sun Microsystems, possibly sell a system to Alcatel in France, for example, if the encryption that accompanies it can be broken by a 14-year-old with too much time on his or her hands? They can't. So Sun came up with a novel solution: buy Russian. The Soviets may have sucked at cars and strip malls, but they sure as hell knew their cryptography. "The Russians can make any kind of encryption you want," says Geoffrey Baehr, chief network officer at Sun. And what can the US government do about a product developed outside its borders? Nothing.
In fact, Sun was so taken with Russia's computing talent that the company recently hired the entire team once responsible for the next generation of Soviet supercomputers (and the Russians brought along the plans for the beasts). Ask Sun chief scientist John Gage (right) if he'd rely on US-approved encryption to send those plans between Moscow and California, and he'll laugh out loud. "We can't rely on that stuff. We're talking trade secrets here!"
ELECTRIC WORD
Sun's Codemaking Comrades
