This will be a short note. The apologists for Clipper on sci.crypt including Sternlight, Denning, Tighe, Goble, and others tend to ultimately fall back on the argument `What's the big deal? Its voluntary!' In some ways, this is their last and most desperate argument. Here are the critical reasons why that is not an acceptable excuse or redeeming feature. 1) Whether Clipper is *currently* voluntary is meaningless given the possibility that it could later become a legislated standard. The argument that it is `voluntary' is worthless unless there is an explicit *guarantee* of such. But, as the original Clipper announcement makes obvious, no such promise is made, apparently because it could not be adhered to. 2) As the CPSR statements point out, NSA has no legal authority to propose a domestic cryptographic standard. (That it pretends that President Clinton and the NIST are the actual purveyors is ugly deceit.) Nor, likely, would any such domestic authority ever be granted to the agency. In some ways, that's the whole point of NIST's cryptographic standards role: that it would be unchained and unmanipulated by NSA. Kammer's meek whimperings in the media prove this is clearly not the case. 3) I don't know who first suggested this, but there is every possibility that the entire plan with Clipper was to make it voluntary *initially* followed by a later legislative enforcement with its proliferation. After all, Clipper would give the NSA the critical `foot in the door' into domestic U.S. cryptography, at which point it would have a toehold to make further encroachments. Hence, the current arguments that `it's only voluntary' are perhaps the ultimate hypocritical lie.