re new reason for clipper alg m secrecy in article apr news clarkson edu tuinstra signal ece clarkson edu soe dwight tuinstra writes first note that the experts will only look at details and of just the algorithm in addition respected experts from outside the government will be offered access to the confidential details of the algorithm to assess its capabilities and publicly report their findings why not the chip design well here s the possiblity in addition to encryption the chip pre processes voice signals to make them easier to analyze transcribe electronically the chip once widespread might effectively be part of a massively parallel computer for voice grepping the us phone network or the criminal wrong thinking patrons thereof first of all the chip doesn t do that it runs at megabits second which is far beyond what you need for voice it s obviously intended for data as well and on high speed lines at that second what advantage is there to doing the processing in the phone i don t care how fancy that chip is it s not as fancy as the roomful of analyzers at fort meade running the program they ll have years from now they can t update every clipper chip that s out there third if they did do this preprocessing in the chip it would probably have a serious effect on recognizability of the voice patterns if nothing else that would hurt the acceptability of the product the v bis modems are just barely fast enough to do a good job on properly massaged voice as is add any more to the mix and you re completely out of the ballpark
