Anonymous User <nobody@soda.berkeley.edu> writes: I see an argument of "what do you need to protect so badly that Clipper cannot work? Are you doing something ILLEGAL? Clipper works, and only
I suppose this has been answered so often that it doesn't make sense to scrub over it again, but I'll give a few short answers anyway. Answer 1: Wrong question: Once you allow the question "What do you have to hide?" about your communications, you don't have a good place to stop the inquiries about the rest of your life. Law enforcement should not be allowed to dictate that you behave in a way that will facilitate their surveillance; they need to show probable cause <before> starting their proceedings against you. Answer 2: Sometimes the advances of science favor the police, and sometimes they don't -- luck of the draw. LE has a lot of tools available that they didn't have a few decades ago, including DNA matching, fiber analysis, and cellular phone triangulation. Crypto may reduce one way for them to read our mail, but they have others that weren't available before; if they have reasonable cause for a court order, let them roll in the Van Eck radiation van, plant bugs, sneak in and dump your hard disk, or whatever. Answer 3: Clipper's a crappy idea anyway. The escrow concept is expensive and wouldn't be used by criminals as long as it's voluntary; it provides a single point of attack for non-governmental bad guys; and any red-neck sheriff who can convince a judge to issue a court order can get keys without the escrow agency even knowing that they're handing over the keys for the Republican state committee's phone system. That's all independent of whether you can trust Mykotronx and their masters not to keep copies of the keys while they're making them before they put them in escrow. Jim Gillogly 8 Afterlithe S.R. 1994, 01:25