One thing that occurs to me: rather than arguing Clipper's technical merits, or whether or not it's Big Brother and therefore evil, we should be making the press aware of the fact that Clipper is going to cost major $$ for the taxpayers. This will be reflected in terms of increased cost on consumer electronics, and in the cost of administration of the key escrow system. Since both agencies for the escrow will be government, the taxpayers are going to bear the entire burden of the very complex (and presumably expensive) escrow management. Our CEO, Steve Walker, has asked how many court ordered wire taps are performed anually. Apparently, the number is very low (under 1,000) - we must question the cost effectiveness of a measure designed to protect wiretapping at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, when apparently wiretapping is not that important a tool in the arsenal of law enforcement. Recently, at the NCSC conference, a Mr. Brooks from NSA spoke on the Clipper panel, and stated proudly that they had been working hard on clipper for over 3 years. Unfortunately, NSA's budget is classified, so we'll never find out how much this B1-bomber of telecommunications has already cost the taxpayer, but we need to bring the potential expense involved to the attention of our various representatives. In a time when people are losing their jobs and government is trying desperately to cut costs, we must ask ourselves if it would be more cost effective to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars clipper will cost the taxpayer on hiring more police officers, or on social programs. I don't believe that our elected representatives or the non-technical press understand the issues behind key escrow. We need to make them understand that effectively clipper means that the consumer will pay more for certain forms of electronics, that the taxpayer will pay more for administering programs of questionable usefulness, and that the government is using covert budgets to subsidize an attempt to compete in the telecommunications business. Our elected representatives and the press understand $300 government toilet seats. Perhaps we need to come up with a nice name for clipper. Rather than calling it the "big brother chip" perhaps we should call it the "B1 bomber of data communications" or point out that it is really an implicit tax on telecommunications. mjr. [PS - these are my personal opinions]