I'm worried about this analogy.
Because if the situation actually follows the analogy, the
government's current surrender on this point will be followed within
a week by a *successful* prohibition of all good cryptography in any
circumstances except under government orders.
See, the Tet offensive was a massive failure in military terms. The
only reason it was a success in *any* terms was that if the US
government's statements about its previous successes had been true,
the NV/Vietcong would not have had the capability to pull it off.
But by the end of the week, what the US government had previously
said about the state of the NV military was a serious overstatement;
there would have been effectively nothing stopping us from marching
north through North Vietnam until we ran into the Chinese.
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