re why the clipper algorithm is secret in apr iecc cambridge ma us johnl iecc cambridge ma us john r levine writes quoting someone else here the cryptographic protocol though is another matter i see no valid reasons for keeping it secret and as i hope i ve shown above there are a lot of ways to do things that aren t quite as bad it just occurred to me why the algorithm is secret if it were published one could then build physically identical clone versions of the chip that would interoperate with official clipper chips but the cloner wouldn t provide the keys to the escrow houses hmmn yeah the algorithm is classified because a military contract or similar government equivalent to military has been let for this proprietary design that the feds say that nsa developed is there a patent is that patent publicly available my betting is that that too is classified if the algorithm were made public or reverse engineered it would compromise not only the goal of justice of being able to read every chip users cypto data but would reduce profits for the selected chip maker wouldn t that just be too bad danny o bedlam dfl panix com cmcl panix dfl danny lieberman po box church st station new yawk new yawk usa
