David T. Witkowski says:
Take two criminals, Danny Dumbo and Sam Smart. If Danny is too dumb to use alternative encryption, where does it follow that he would use any sort of encryption at all? Thus whether his equipment is Clippered or not, the gov't could easily tap his line. Whereas Sam is smart enough to choose some other form of encryption that the gov't can't monitor. So what good does Clipper do in either case? And thus, why does it even exist? If the gov't needs Clipper to secure its own communications, why don't they just sanctify PGP or something likewise?
Last week, the Wall Street Journal had an excellent article on a drug smuggling ring that got caught -- they were the folks who brought in flights of cocaine for Pablo Escobar. They had an excellent intelligence network, flew spotter planes to provide them with information on the movement of government planes, etc. They were finally captured one day by pure accident as a result of a chain of events starting from a chance unscheduled overflight by an AWACS plane on a training mission. It is unlikely that they would be so stupid as to use government cryptography. Criminals are sometimes not smart, but the ones who are a supposed threat to us will rapidly learn what crypto to use, just as even stupid people can learn to use cars and learn the difference between stick and automatic. Perry