= Tim
To be fair to Jim Bell, he made the same point a day or so ago.
Then I agree with him on this. I'm not making any claims of orginality or of depth here -- it's a simple point, probably too obvious for most people here to concern themsevles with. But at the same time, it's a central point. Big business has a lot of clout in America. People who stand on soapboxes in the park (or on the net) and make impassioned speeches on behalf of liberty don't. I expect the "golden key" group will get the export restrictions on crypto killed. That's one head of the monster, although there will be other heads left.
I don't necessarily sift Stewart Baker's words for hermeneutical signs of what the government is planning. He might just as well have included "public opinion" in his list, and nothing would change.
But he didn't. You're right, it wouldn't have altered his argument in any significant way if he had. But the public *was* left of his "policy triumverate". I don't want to read too much into it either, but he was talking about the differences between who is participating in the crypto discussions in America and in Japan -- who's included and who's excluded was central to what he was saying, not an afterthought he hadn't thought through.
And I'm quite sure that Baker, Denning, Nelson, et. al. are acutely aware of the role of the "public" in these matters. The "public" as made manifest in newspaper articles critical of Clipper, in "Wired" features against key escrow and in favor of Cypherpunks-type themes, and so on.
My impression is that they look at the vast majority of people who rail against clipper as spoiled children who don't know what's good for them, and who must be protected from their own folly. Of course I'm not including people like Tim in that "vast majority". Tim ought to be flattered by how seriously they take his ideas on crypto anarchy. But people like me? I don't think we figure into the equation.
While the "vocal minority" that rails against Administration policy in sci.crypt, talk.politics.crypto, comp.org.eff.talk, this list, etc., are not the public at large, we are certainly a part of the public.
The only problem I have with this statement is that it's not strong enough. Public sentiment is overwhelmingly lopsided in support of our point of view. But does that have an effect on policy?
I think the rejection of Clipper by "the public" is proof of this.
What killed Clipper? It's hard to say. There was certainly very strong public opposition, but I'm not sure it was worth as much in the end as Blaze's attack. If Clipper had worked, it would probably be alive today. Blaze's attack demonstrated that even those who aren't worried about the government's intentions ought to worry about its competence. And although opposistion to Clipper from business was less visible than the current opposition to export restrictions, it was there. AT&T was roundly criticized for agreeing to work with Clipper should it have come to pass, but they did speak out against it (and paid Matt's salary). I'm inclined to give more credit to Blaze and the companies who spoke against it than to public sentiment, although I can't think of an objective way to confirm my suspicions.
(If we were leftist theoreticians, we could debate for years or even decades whether our movement is truly a mass movement, or just a vanguard movement, etc.)
I'm not sure those distinctions are useful, but for whatever it's worth, I don't think debates about crypto anarchy, or fights over key management are ever going to be joined by the public at large. It takes a lot of work to understand the issues, and most people have their hands full with the things that are going on in their own lives and careers. Clipper was easy to grab ahold of -- big brother wants to put a wiretapping chip in your phone, what do you think of that? I don't know that the rest of the points we'll fight over will be as accessible. The devil's in the details, and the details are hard to slog through. (I wasn't able to get any of my friends excited when Netscape let users choose which CAs to trust in 2.0b3, for example.) All I'm really saying is that having business on our side of the export issue is a good thing, and it could very well be the difference between victory and defeat, despite the fact that some of the companies in question might have questionable credentials as civil libertarians. The text Hal quoted gave some small reinforcement of that point of view, in my opinion. I wouldn't argue that it's enough to prove that big businesses have a disproportionate amount of political clout -- that's probably another job best left to the leftist theoreticians.