The letters John Gilmore received through FOIA are interesting. So are the reactions of the cypherpunks. I think it's valuable for society to have a group of people examine such information in an extremely skeptical manner, even bordering on paranoia. The notion that these documents are a ploy to fool people into thinking the government is aware of the problems with their proposal and has weighed them carefully is worthy of speculation. Such thoughts lead to potential avenues of investigation that may turn up useful information. But there seems to be an overabundance of such views... I think the cypherpunks can better serve society by considering ALL possibilities and investigating the more plausible ones. Including the possibilities that some of the bad guys aren't maximally devious, competent, or even bad guys. I see a lot of use of the word "they", as if the Department of Defense was part of the same group of people as NIST, NSA, the president, etc. etc. and they all are working together with the exact same set of goals and motivations. I think the situation in Washington is more complex than that. And DoD is one player I haven't heard anything previous about with regard to their stance on and involvement with Clipper. In addition to the notion that they totally support Clipper, it should be considered whether they might totally oppose it (unlikely), whether they've chosen not to be involved in the struggle over it and are simply trying to analyze its potential effects on them and disseminate the information internally to be better prepared, or whether perhaps there are differences of opinion between varying individuals in the DoD power structure. And of course, even if you label them bad guys, there's the possibility that someone wanted a summary of valid opposition arguments in order to be able to combat them more effectively, and naively failed to adequately protect them from being revealed to the opposition through the FOIA. I don't have any particular opinion as to what's going on here. I just feel I ought to say something any time I only see one point of view represented in a discussion of such a complicated issue. Particularly when such a small portion of the relevant information is, thus far, available. Dr. Cat