I've been invited to revise my 3700 word article "Can Wiretaps Remain Cost-Effective?" (which appeared in the CPSR Sourcebook on Cryptography, July 1993) into a 2000 word Viewpoint article in CACM (the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery), to appear as soon as I'm ready. As a first year grad student, I haven't been keeping much track of Clipper & Digital-Telephony stuff, and am now struggling to catch up. If any cypherpunks could help, I'd be appreciative. For example, my paper last year included the sentence The current government contractor claims it will offer the wiretap chips for about $26 each in lots of 10,000 [2], over twice the $10 each a competing private developer claims it would charge [11] for a chip with comparable functionality, minus wiretap support. as part of an attempt to estimate the direct costs imposed by the "clipper" chip. I recall seeing that they are now offering these wiretap chips for $15 each, but can't seem to find the source for that. I'm also told the clipper chips are big VSLI chips, and too big to fit into cellular phones which are the main current potential market for encryption chips. Can anyone offer more technically savvy and up to date estimates of any of the added costs such wiretap chips impose over other encryption chips? The current Edwards/Leahy Digital Telephony Bill appears on the surface to be a big step in the direction of this proposal from my paper: Regarding phone company support for wiretaps, it seems clear that if wiretaps are in fact cost-effective, there must be some price per wiretap so that police would be willing to pay for wiretaps, and phone companies would be willing to support them. As long as the current law requiring police to pay phone company "expenses" is interpreted liberally enough, the market should provide wiretaps, if they are valuable. But there are big differences in reality. In this new bill, 1) the money to pay phone companies comes out of a different pot, so police in the field can't really make tradeoffs between paying more for wiretaps vs. more for other forms of investigation, and 2) instead of a volentary transaction to ensure that costs are more than benefits, "costs" reimbursed are estimated by some unclear legal process. What do folks think of the following analogy? We don't object to police being able to pay willing informants, but we would certainly object to requiring everyone to be an informant, even if we were paid court-determined "costs" for our efforts. Of better yet, consider that we don't require companies that make guns, cars, or computers to sell to the police at some court-determined "cost". Robin Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu 818-683-9153 2433 Oswego St., Pasadena, CA 91107 FAX: 818-405-9841 818-395-4093 Div. Hum. & Soc. Sci. 228-77 Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125