Even though the white house proposal may seem bad it could be used to your advantage in some ways: swap keys with someone else... if serial number isnt sent in transmission this takes gives a big headache when they try to decrypt your stream. use another encryption before sending to clipper chip... this way everything looks normal, and if they are playing according to the rules (cross fingers) they dont know anything is fishy until they try to get a warrant and decrypt. First keys wont match. When they do find the correct key they'll decrypt and get a file encrypted in another system. This might be great for averting suspicion of using another crypto- system. Everyone will be using clipper, and your message will look like its from the clipper chip. It wont look like an RSA file or DES'ed voice or whatever. The chip gives you a opaque (hopefully) envelope to put things into.