Makes *what* a whole lot easier, building the bomb or catching the bombers?
It makes it easier for any clandestine plan to be established and carried out. This is the greatest fear they have. Arbitrary networks of people with arbitrary purposes can be securely formed world wide within the limits of the trust inherent in the people. Can you spell r e v o l u t i o n? It's not me that's paranoid, it's them. :-)
While stopping terrorists may be easier in a country with pre-taped communications, and organizing otherwise undetected insurrection will be a little closer to possible, this is not the main purpose of wiretaps today or in the future. The real targets of wiretaps (now and in the future) are political activists. Anyone who poses a serious threat to large corporate profits is a target for a wire tap. This includes organizations like Greanpeace, the communist party, CISPES, and even libertarians who oppose superfluous military intervention. Sure, blowing up the world trade center costs money, but cutting arms sales to Indonesia just because of some little genocide on an island with only a few hundred thousand inhabitants... That cuts into profits; especially if it catches on. In the past, if Dow wants to put a tap on my friend's mom's phone (a prominent anti-pesticide activist), they can just hire a private investigator to climb the poll and sift through the conversations. No, they never found out who was taping the line, for some reason they didn't think to ask the guy who came around once a week to change the tapes on top of the pole (go figure). In the world where Clipper is predominant, the government will have a monopoly on this sort of activity. Two things are clear to follow: First, there will be fewer PIs able to do wiretaps. People chasing after abducted children or forgoten alimony cheques will be out of luck. Second, the government will be pressured into taking on the activities that are now done by PIs (at a substantially greater cost of course). This will force some relaxing of the rules governing obtaining escrowed keys. Since anyone purchasing the key escrow devices will have implicitly agreed to (amongst other things) wave any expectation of privacy associated with using the device, they probably wont have to much legal ground to stand on when they discover the their phone conversations have been sold to Exon. brad