The proposed standards I've seen on the net say you can't encrypt *after* using Clipper, because that makes Clipper key-theft useless. On the other hand, encryption with real systems before encrypting with Clipper is undetectable until after they decrypt the Clipper, so it's hard to enforce except on people who are already suspects, and is unlikely to be convenient to implement (for interoperability) on some of the major Clipper targets, like cellphones and fax machines.

Makes sense, doesn't it? When the whitehouse guy said that encryption below clipper was legal but not above, we thought he was confused. However, we ACKed it with an NSA employee, and he confirmed it. His reasoning went like this: encryption below clipper can't be stopped, since one can just splice a cryptdec into the phone line. Encryption on top of clipper is impossible since the clipper phone will only accept audio input. No word on how that would effect clipper modems. Having said all this, I should note that the NSA employee was not acting in an official capacity, and that he was not directly working on clipper.