(1) I'm not an anarchist. Does that make me out of place here? I'm willing to live with some amount of government, as long as us owners stand a chance of controlling or overthrowing it. My biggest problem with Capstone is that it changes the balance of power too much. (2) I think crimes can be committed in cyberspace. Substantially, if not entirely, in cyberspace. Maybe not so many now. But I think it's intellectually dishonest of us who understand the growing importance of cyberspace to claim there won't be any social contracts there that could be violated. I accept the terms of the 4th ammendment: search and siezure allowed when due process followed. "Key escrow" is an attempt to implement the cyberspatial analog of search. (3) The Feds must know they can't prevent modestly well funded, educated, and motivated folks from using unbreakable cryptography amongst themselves. The argument for doing key escrow anyway is that by installing a breakable infrastructure, they'll make enough investigations cheaper and more effective to be worth it. Note that's a comparison of their money and success rate against our privacy; no wonder they got it so wrong. (4) If you accept points (1) and (2) above, you're left wanting a way to implement searches in cyberspace when due process is followed. I hope anarchists won't be the only people opposing changing the balance of power greatly in the government's favor (by poorly designed key escrow). What are the rest of us left to answer with? Perhaps a much better key escrow design. One that integrates the search with the due process in a cryptographically strong way; one that can't be subverted by a few people in a few organizations. For example, who says an escrowed key must have only two parts? Why not a whole lot of parts, distributed to a whole lot of people/organizations? If there are only 1000 legal wiretaps in a year, and they're already fairly expensive, we can add a fair amount to the cost before it gets significant. And again, remember where we're weighing money against freedom. It may be that we just have to spend more to stay a reasonably free society. Also, it's worth debating just how strong the protections have to be. Will we need them to be stronger than those against physical searches? How few people does it take to subvert the current protections against illegal searches? Do we feel that needs to be changed? How much are we willing to spend on it?