Here's another one of those apparent "trial balloons," this time from an influential former Director of the NSA. As DIRNSA, Admiral Inman was the one who in the late 1970s proposed restrictions on the use of public key cryptography, at least according to Bamford in "The Puzzle Palace." Inman later was in the CIA, then MCC in Austin, and is now involved in venture capital in various ways. I believe his VC firm invested in Cylink, one of the four partners in Public Key Partners (the others being RSADSI, Stanford, and MIT). (Paranoids like us might look for links to Mykotronx....) Enough speculation for now. Here's the item: From: howard@hal.com (Howard Gayle) Newsgroups: talk.politics.crypto,alt.politics.libertarian,comp.org.eff.talk,alt.privacy.clipper Subject: von Mises Inst. Free Market article on Clipper Date: 19 Sep 1993 16:29:34 GMT Message-ID: <27i1de$edv@hal.com> Reply-To: howard@hal.com (Howard Gayle) Summary: Government subsidies imply government control. Keywords: Bobby Ray Inman, NSA, registration, EFF The September 1993 issue of "The Free Market" has an article by Gary McGath about Clipper. "The Free Market" is a monthly non-technical newsletter from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Gary McGath is the publisher of the "Thomas Paine Review." Here's a quote: "Bobby Ray Inman, former director of the NSA, has even proposed `a registry of institutions which can legally use ciphers,' as he explained in his recent book. `If you get somebody using one who isn't registered, then you go after him.'" McGath also mentions the EFF: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes the Clipper, still applauds legislation to subsidize network access. But by inviting the government to build their `highway,' EFF is inviting in the traffic cops. "The only way to keep our communications free of governmental intrusion is to keep them free of governmental involvement." -- Howard Gayle HAL Computer Systems, Inc. 1315 Dell Avenue Campbell, California 95008 USA howard@hal.com Phone: +1 408 379 7000 extension 1080 FAX : +1 408 379 5022 --