I got a call one week ago today (Tuesday May 25th) from Josh Ramo at the science desk at Newsweek. I spoke to him for about an hour on the technicalities and politics of encryption. He was to my pleasant surprise quite able to follow a telephone description of how Diffie-Hellman key exchange works (!) and was quite conducive to my explanation of some of the less public aspects of the clipper project. I think we got extremely good coverage in this article. Here are some of the aspects involved. -- Josh mentioned that he had Dorothy Denning on his list of people to call. She did not get quoted; I did. There's significance to that. -- The pro-crypto quote came first. Kammer's quote, on technical matters, not political ones, came in the middle. The scary ominous 'mandatory standard' quote, from NIST, came last. -- They did not replay the White House line that skipjack is so much harder to crack than DES. I convinced Josh that by iterating DES, the pracatical security of the underlying ciphers was the same, i.e. impenetrable. Thus, no propagation of half-truths. -- The sub-headline is against false cryptography. -- The phrase "civil libertarians and corporations" was used, implying a united front across liberal/conservative lines against this proposal. This phrase was extremely clever on their behalf to avoid specifically mentioning partisan politics. -- The NSA is protrayed as demanding and coercive. First they'll deny government contracts and export licenses, and if that doesn't work, they'll outlaw it. -- Cellular phone are touted as insecure, implying that something ought to be done about that. -- The sidebar has an example of cryptography four millenia old; that's respectable. -- The article does not play up the escrow aspects of the wiretap chip. Their simplification, that the government has your key, attains the root issue without confusion. -- They mention that the keys wil have to be stored on computers, and are thus vulnerable. This a point I made specifically to Josh, and they took my example of foreign intelligence and *expanded* on it. --They mention that NIST worked on the algorithm with the NSA. All in all, I don't think we could have hoped for better. There's just about nothing flattering said about the wiretap chip, and plenty of things against it. The article is about as anti-Clipper as you might expect given that Newsweek does not want to appear too partisan one way or another. Eric