I'll leave it to someone else to post the entire article, but the gist is that Gore sent a letter to Maria Cantwell saying that the administration is willing to consider alternatives to Clipper that are based upon nonclassified algrithms, and where the escrow agents are not government agencies. They still insist on an escrow system, however.
This was an incredibly wise move on their part. We who still find the kindler gentler Clipper unacceptable are going to have a much harder time convincing the public at large of our case. Before Clipper was such a completley idiotic idea that almost anyone who wasn't on the NSA-s payrole would automatically oppose it. It's still a bad idea, but a public-domain algorithm clipper with non-governmental escrow agents isn't quite as obvously insane and inane as the previous clipper. On the other hand, we already have "clipper is bad", implanted in a lot of people's minds. I don't think the administration is going to be able to shake that loose quite so easily. And I do think we can convince many people that new improved clipper is bad because of the escrow agency alone. But it's not so easy. If the administation had come out with a version of this kinder gentler clipper from the start, it might actually have been succesful.