Looks like the Clipper fan club is growing by leaps and bounds... PC/Computing, October 1993 Page 468 (opposite inside back cover). Note: _abc_ indicates italics. Illustration: several computers with keyholes in the screens. Clinton's smiling face rises from the White House, as a long arm reaches out with a key... ----------------------------------------------------------------- Penn Jillette Subterranean Clipper Chip Blues "Phone's tapped anyway." So do it for Dylan and for Jefferson (Airplane, Starship, and Thomas). I'VE NEVER HAD a sip of alcohol, nor any recreational drugs (not one puff to uninhale), but, being 38 years old, I feel I was part of the hippie culture. I was young and rural in the sixties, but my formative years were spent listening to music created by people who chased the muse down many chemical alleys. Top 40 radio blared that the government wasn't to be trusted. Dylan sang "Phone's tapped anyway," and his inflection said that was a bad thing. But even as I was sucking up the culture, my skeptical side said that all the "Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming..." stuff might be a little dramatic. Romanticizing living outside the law, coupled with the physiological effect of drugs, might be making these artists a little paranoid, a little nutty. The joke was kinda on me. Paranoid or not, John Lennon _was_ on Nixon and FBI hate lists, the Vietnam War probably _was_ a very bad idea, and the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up really _did_ happen. No government is to be trusted. I could have gotten a stronger lesson from the founding fathers, but they didn't have any records out. "You say you want a revolution?"..."The government that governs least governs best." Clinton is younger than any Rolling Stone (unless they replace Bill Wyman with a new bass player from his ex-wife's generation). It would seem that Bill _Jefferson_ Clinton would share the mistrust of Big Brother that we tapped our collective foot to. But remember, he's not Bob Dylan and Neil Young - he's Kenny G and Fleetwood Mac. Watch him. Willy picked up Bush's evil encryption Clipper Chip fascist football and ran with it ("Meet the new boss - same as the old boss"). The Clipper Chip is supposed to give us more privacy, which we need. An ex-friend of mine taped Madonna talking to her business manager on her cordless phone, and some punk ("punk" in the prison sense) broke into my Internet account and read my mail. The Clipper Chip, which was designed by government engineers, would be used to scramble and decode information so that only the addressee could read it. The government would sell this chip below market value (some people believe they'd be getting something for nothing; some people believe Elvis put syringes in Pepsi), and we'd all have cheap privacy. Oh, by the way ("The large print giveth, the small print taketh away"), the government would keep all the keys so they could eavesdrop on might-be-bad-guys (with a subpoena, of course). _What?!_ The antl-Clipper Chip people sent me megs and megs of reasons why the Clipper Chip sucks (the information on how it works is kept secret, so private scientists wouldn't be able to check for mistakes; trade with other countries would be difficult; how safe could the codes be kept?; and so on). Big cheese computer people yapped against it, and it got shot down the first time around on the legislation front. On the tech front, there is a great cypherpunk ("punk" in the rock and roll sense) alternative called Pretty Good Privacy, which is nongovernment and free. One of my math-hip friends explained public-key encryption to me, and it's pretty thinking; I'll try to explain it in a future column. There was even talk of making private encryption illegal (an evil idea, pure and simple). The more research I did, the simpler it got. You have inalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's it. We have a right to communicate with anyone we choose without anyone listening in. The government works for us. Power to the people. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Wow. One of the better anti-Clipper flames I've seen so far. Simple and to the point. Repost this one everywhere. Technical question: from what I've read, Clipper is only a single- key system, basically an 80-bit super-DES. So when you hit the SECURE button on your AT&T ClipperPhone, how do the phones exchange session keys? DH exchange or something similar? Is this implemented in the Clipper chip itself, or in external hardware? Is the format standardized? If not, there will be plenty of interoperability problems with the first generation of phones. For that matter, there will probably be problems even if it is standardized. Will it work over a standard phone line? If so, the phone must be using data compression and a 14.4 modem or something. They'd have to use forward error correction, too, because a 1-bit error would cause, upon decryption, at least an 8-byte error burst. That's a very noticeable click at 6-8KHz sampling rate. I haven't been able to get any details. I called Mykotronx and they told me that the app notes weren't ready yet, and offered to put me on a waiting list for them.