re don t fight clipper chip subvert or replace it robert lewis glendenning rlglende netcom com wrote clipper chip is a response to the fact that there is no business or professional body in a position to establish a standard and provide chipsets to implement it for analog or digial transmission systems rsa might be in position to do it if they had active cooperation of a couple of manufacturers of cellular phones or desktop phones is rsa independt of the gov enough to spearhead this i for one would gladly pay royalties via purchasing secure phones hear hear i completely agree that we need to work quickly to establish alternatives to the government s clinton clipper as brad templeton and others have noted once the clipper becomes ensconced in enough phones there will be enormous pressure to make it the legal standard and it will become the market standard as well there is a lot of confusion in the proposal about whether the use of clipper is mandated about whether non escrow alternatives will be allowed etc there are also unclear issues about how hard or how illegal it will be to make workalikes which meet the standard but which generate phony or untappable keys i m sure the next several weeks will see these issues thrashed out in this and other groups meanwhile i d be interested to hear rsa data security s reaction often criticized in this group for their licensing policies the usual complaints about mailsafe costing too much at or so and the general issue of software patents we may find that allying ourselves with rsa is the best thing we can do what s a mere licensing fee when our liberty may be at stake if everyone who wanted true security paid say for a lifetime use of all of rsa s patents which expire in the period or so then rsa would make tons of money and be happy i m sure a small price to pay for those to whom sounds like too much i m sure the actual terms could be different spread out over several years whatever to me it s a small price to pay strong crypto means strong privacy escrowing keys sending copies of keys to large databases and splitting keys into two bit pieces all done with secret and non analyzable protocols and algorithms is not strong crypto whatever some of us may think about the abstract principles of patenting number theory applications this minor issue pales in comparison with the potential dangers of the clipper proposal note that i said potential we ll presumably learn more in the coming months the rsa algorithms are at least public have been analyzed and attacked for years and source code is available to better ensure no deliberate weakenesses or trapdoors i know of a number of groups putting together voice encryption systems using off the shelf hardware like soundblaster boards for the pc and celp type software the new generations of pcs using fast s and pentiums are fast enough to do real time voice encryption combined with diffie hellman key exchange this should provide an alternative to the clipper system of course we don t really know if the administration proposes to outlaw competing systems it seems to me that their goal of tapping terrorists child pornographers and hilary bashers would be thwarted if low cost alternatives to clipper proliferated not to defend child pornographers or terrorists but limiting basic freedoms to catch a few criminals is not the american way of doing things end of soapbox mode i suggest we in these groups set aside any differences we may have had with rsa and don t look at me i have both macpgp and a fully legal copy of mailsafe and instead work with them as quickly as we can rsa jim are you listening tim may p s i reserve the right to retract these opinions if it should turn out that rsa data security was involved in the clipper proposal timothy c may crypto anarchy encryption digital money tcmay netcom com anonymous networks digital pseudonyms zero knowledge reputations information markets w a s t e aptos ca black markets collapse of governments higher power public key pgp and mailsafe available
