I just read over the Clipper-III paper. Here's the main scoop. The Government is trying to force key escrow on the world by incorporating it into key certification systems. They are playing on public ignorance of key certification, and are trying in some cases to deliberately mislead people into thinking that key certification and key escrow are the same thing. Key certification is a way for a third party to declare that a particular public key "belongs to" a particular identity. E.g. that key 85197FB5 really belongs to John Gilmore. In PGP, people who know you can "sign" your key to make this declaration. Then, anyone who trusts those people will know that your key is really yours. When they encrypt mail with public key 85197FB5, they can believe that only John Gilmore can read it. Key certification NEVER involves giving anyone a copy of your *private* key. Your private key is, and always should be, private to yourself and nobody else. Key escrow is a way for governments to get access to your private key and read your private communications whenever they don't like what you are doing or saying. Or for any other reason. So far, the only government that is really pushing for this is the US government. Their published policies for when they will access your key are disturbingly non-specific. I believe this is to cover for access by the spy agencies such as NSA, which the public would not sanction if it knew their current policies. Even if the published policy for accessing your escrowed keys required that a judge issue a warrant based on probable cause to believe a crime has been committed -- which it doesn't -- that provides no protection from a government that feels free to make any harmless act into a crime. As in the Soviet Union, lofty principles can be written into the legal documents, but somehow citizens end up without enforceable rights anyway. I don't want to see my country go this route, though it's obviously 80% of the way there already. Because large-scale key certification systems will to some degree involve centralization, they provide pressure points where the government can try to force people to do bad things. (One thing that has kept the Internet free is that there was no central place to sue, arrest, threaten, or otherwise terrorize into submission.) In this case, the bad thing they'll try to force is that the central certification authorities will refuse to certify your key as yours, even though they know it's yours, unless you first give the government a copy of your private key. Foreign relations are important to this policy, since if a significant number of countries don't adopt this model then it won't work. (Those countries will build good crypto and export it, and it will leak out around the world because of the worldwide demand for real privacy.) The US is working hard in the OECD, the European Community, and in one-on-one discussions with other governments, to convince them all to impose key escrow on their citizens. That's the scenario laid out by the Clipper-III paper. It's a pretty good strategy on their part. Our job is to make it come out some other way. John Gilmore PS: The whole paper is at http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/Key_escrow/ Clipper_III/960520_nist_clipper3_paper.draft.