clipper considered harmful if clipper comes to cellular phones along with legal proscriptions against using other cipher systems on these phones a new and potentially dangerous class of crime is created criminals who very badly want inscrutable tactical communications specifically the terrorists and drug dealers who proponents of key escrow cite as threats will be highly motivated to steal the cipher phone of a legitimate user and to kill this person or hold them hostage so discovery of compromise of the device will be delayed once a suitable collection of devices is stolen criminals can communicate with impunity assuming the cipher system carries no trapdoors apart from key escrow until and unless the compromise is discovered by some other means because life is cheap criminals are currently willing to kill people to steal very large and conspicuous property luxury cars it is reasonable to assume that they will be willing to kill people to steal small and inconspicuous property a cipher cellular phone just as we have seen in the past with blue box technology and in the present with modified cellular phones we can expect to see among high stakes criminals a lucrative market for stolen cipher phones which can be used for a few days the high stakes criminals will pay the life is cheap types substantial amounts for stolen instruments because a person is typically discovered as missing or dead in a few days a stolen instrument will be usable for only a few days there will be a continuing demand for fresh phones fresh bodies in other words clipper and similar systems have the potential to turn a current inconvenience to law enforcement into a direct vicious and persistent threat to the general public on the other hand if a criminal were to apply some arbitrary cipher to a device in a mostly non ciphered network the communication will at least stand out as being unusual and perhaps worthy of other means of investigation finally because there is essentially no possibility of intercepting in realtime the scrutable content of communications between stolen instruments there will exist strong motivation to record and archive all communications in the network for ex post facto scrutiny once some criminal act is discovered and the instruments involved have been identified while recording and archiving may not be feasible for wireline networks it is probably feasible across the more limited bandwidth of radio networks the existence of these recordings could open up vast potential for abuse brad yearwood brad optilink com uunet pyramid optilink brad petaluma ca
