If I may boil down one side of the Clipper/Capstone debate, it is certain members of the government saying: "We need to implement this encryption method so as to avoid problems we think may be coming. Trust us! We promise not to abuse your privacy." [except for the following--expandable--list of reasons.] Unlike some in this debate, I do not doubt the sincerity of Dorothy Denning or others like her. And I would have a lot fewer problems with Clipper/Capstone proposal if the people who will be granting access to the keys and those with legal access to the keys were of Dorothy's caliber. However, people of good will are not likely to be the ones who apply for these keys to your privacy in the future. I am right in the middle of a case which has remarkable similarities to a Clipper "request for keys." Full details have been posted to comp.eff.talk and misc.legal, but in brief summery, a Postal Inspector from Tennessee is attempting (for political reasons) to impose the obscenity standards of that region on an adult BBS run from Milpitas (just North of San Jose). To this end, he obtained a warrant to take the BBS hardware. Because of contained email and First Amendment activities of a BBS, subpoenas, not warrants, are required under two sections of federal law. The laws are Title 42, Section 2000aa, and Title 18 Section 2701, the same ones which were applied in the well-known Steve Jackson Games case. Pointers to these federal laws were *posted* on the BBS. The postal inspector downloaded this file (most of which *I* originally wrote), and *included* it in his affidavit for a search warrant to a Magistrate-Judge in San Francisco, along with a remarkably weak theory of how he could avoid application of these laws to himself. To obtain a warrant to take email and 2000aa materials, a number of judicial findings should have been made. None were. The postal inspector got his warrant, mailed child pornography to the BBS, served the warrant, and "found" the child porn. To give you an idea of the good will (and competence) of the particular agent involved, he had not included the child porn in the warrant, and so had to fill out another document at the time of the search. On this form he specifically described the material as "sent without his knowledge" (referring to the sysop). Of course this statement did not prevent this child pornography (in the sysop's house for all of half an hour) from being the basis of one count (of 12) of a grand jury indictment the BBS sysop faces in Tennessee. This warrant example applies to the Clipper situation. The risk under Clipper is that your private communications will be protected by the *weakest* link in the chain--one of the thousands of low level Magistrate-Judges among whom law enforcement agents shop for warrants and will shop for keys. These judges tend to be busy, or lazy or both, and they *trust* law enforcement agents. Even if the law is *directly quoted* in search warrant affidavits or key requests, and these laws *expressly forbid* granting warrants or key requests under the conditions cited, the judge may not even read a lengthy supporting affidavit before approving it. He is *very* unlikely to consider a the underlying laws when granting a request. The key escrow agents provide no protection whatsoever since they simply fill orders from agents with approved applications. Judges ignore the law with impunity, and so do law enforcement agents because one agency will almost never investigate another. As a practical matter, applications for search warrants are almost never denied. The same situation is certain to occur for Clipper key applications, no mater how weak the justification happens to be, or what laws are being violated by those seeking the keys. Keith Henson