In an abrupt and significant reversal, the Clinton administration indicated Wednesday that it was willing to consider alternatives to its Clipper chip wiretapping technology, which has been widely criticized by industry executives and privacy-rights groups.

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.

There's a quote from Marc Rotenberg saying that the escorw requirement is still unacceptable.

The article implied that in exchange for this, the Cantwell amendment had been scrapped. This was far more important, IMHO. The government never had a chance to impose that silly chip. But threatening prison to people who export crypto is extremelly painful to people trying to build businesses based on things that use cryptography. Has the government ever actually prosecuted somebody for exporting crypto source code via the net? It seems like an interesting test case, and based on the ruling about exporting applied cryptography, I would say that it was permitted. (After all, our right to free speach involves the transmission of ideas. I can understand them stopping the export of physical things like computer disks, but not source code). So does anybody actually know of a case in which the government attempted to jail somebody for knowingly transmitting cryptographic programs from the US? JWS