re the clipper chip a technical summary in article apr guvax acc georgetown edu denning guvax acc georgetown edu writes the following document summarizes the clipper chip how it is used how programming of the chip is coupled to key generation and the escrow process and how law enforcement decrypts communications interesting tell us what happens if i were to say ok i want to have something else if the law enforcement wants my traffic they can record it then get a search warrant and get the keys from me just like they would the keys to a stout private safe etc lets say i suspect that there is a way to trivially crack this at the fed level with no warrant say for nsa scanning for keywords etc and the government has abused great power in the past so i say mr vendor i want something different independent i am a paranoid sort ya understand will the result be sorry without government permission we cannot sell you anything secure or would it be sorry we know which side our bread is buttered on we cannot sell except to government people law enforcement and special people what in your opinion would be the chances of sure we will sell you this secure system be happy to also please be so kind as to tell us what the plans are for private encryption of say files transferred by modem or ftp or data stored on disk surely you have a feel for what the administration is planning for us people on that with your rather intimate relationship with the fbi nsa etc you must certainly have an idea you are surely not going to say the people are not to know until it is too late this is supposed to be government of the people by the people isn t it that is the people are the government s bosses the bosses want to know what the is going on here you see i am kind of nervous because in the last month or so i have seen a non stop stream of ideas coming out of wash dc that at least appear very strongly to have a common trait to limit privacy freedom from govt eavesdropping and the ability to defend ourselves against violent attack no is not good enough for common folk they arrive only in time to clean up the mess i would be dead if i had to depend on you see with all that talk about national smart id cards limiting of encryption to government approved denial of means to effective personal defense eight bills in congress right now it looks an awfully lot like the whole thing is to be able to trace every activity of an individual from cradle to grave all it would take is requiring that national id card to be used in all transactions and with no effective data protection and with the people suitably disarmed there would not be a helluva lot they could do about it now would there all in the name of the war on the constitu er drugs and of course that catch word terrorists what is wrong with good old fashioned police work to build a case they don t want to have to be burdened to leave the office it seems please read the bill of rights first ten amendments to the us constitution and tell us how you can reconcile this big brother ish policy of the administration always for a crisis of some kind isn t it with that bill of rights in the context of the people who wrote it reassure us please or is that no longer regarded as necessary seeing as apparantly the people have no input on this agenda the administration preferring to make all the decisions in secret then springing it on us doesn t sound much like by the people to me i cannot help notice that the congress people involved were not mentioned on the press release i find that more than a little bit curious don t you i sure would like to know who to not vote for come election time yes i am upset i feel you are a part of this because i recall it was you that was posting heavily in favor of a very similar idea could have been the same thing it was so close a few months ago i also recall it was not well received apparantly powers that be really didn t care or were not told or both from what i see clipper will only be useful for conversations i don t want the neighborhood kid listening in on any serious security i don t think i would want to trust it a bit might as well use cleartext certainly corporations would be rather dumb to depend on this for serious trade secret data especially if millions depended on that security given enough money one could buy any keys they wanted buy a crooked judge and a crooked cop given a few hundred thou they wouldn t be hard to find so we end up with only criminals terrorists and the government with real security and the ability to eavesdrop you know the first two if they are serious ain t going to use this thing for their communications i bet the government won t either except perhaps to order a pizza tell us will that be prima face evidence of criminal activity someone not using the government approved methods that just a desire to have privacy is no longer regarded as a legitimate right of an unconnected citizen will that be grounds for a fly through the door raid and confiscation of all one s equipment as terrorist tools using civil forfeiture so there will be no inconvenient need to prove any wrongdoing on the part of the citizen i have yet another question are we going to see articles in all the public magazines consisting of soothing text telling us how great this is how nice the government is by letting us have this illusion of privacy that the government is going to be so kind as to let us sort of exercise a right what you want to bet that i am correct here please answer these questions as citizens of the united states we hava a right to know what our government plans to let us have out of the goodness of their hearts funny thing though with all these proposals i don t feel one bit safer from drug dealers terrorists or a common street thug i am beginning to wonder if the greater danger lies in the above entities or our own government gone out of control re assure us please so far i haven t seen much to reassure me and a lot to greatly disturb me pat rwing uucp without prejudice ucc pat myrto seattle wa if all else fails try uunet pilchuck rwing pat wisdom only two things are infinite the universe and human stupidity and i am not sure about the former albert einstien
