heavy Clipper ammunition

[L. Detweiler]

This will be a short note.  The apologists for Clipper on sci.crypt
including Sternlight, Denning, Tighe, Goble, and others tend to
ultimately fall back on the argument `What's the big deal? Its
voluntary!'  In some ways, this is their last and most desperate
argument.  Here are the critical reasons why that is not an acceptable
excuse or redeeming feature.

1) Whether Clipper is *currently* voluntary is meaningless given the
possibility that it could later become a legislated standard. The
argument that it is `voluntary' is worthless unless there is an
explicit *guarantee* of such. But, as the original Clipper announcement
makes obvious, no such promise is made, apparently because it could not
be adhered to.

2) As the CPSR statements point out, NSA has no legal authority to
propose a domestic cryptographic standard. (That it pretends that
President Clinton and the NIST are the actual purveyors is ugly
deceit.)  Nor, likely, would any such domestic authority ever be
granted to the agency.  In some ways, that's the whole point of NIST's
cryptographic standards role: that it would be unchained and
unmanipulated by NSA.  Kammer's meek whimperings in the media prove
this is clearly not the case.

3) I don't know who first suggested this, but there is every
possibility that the entire plan with Clipper was to make it voluntary
*initially* followed by a later legislative enforcement with its
proliferation. After all, Clipper would give the NSA the critical `foot
in the door' into domestic U.S. cryptography, at which point it would
have a toehold to make further encroachments.  Hence, the current
arguments that `it's only voluntary' are perhaps the ultimate hypocritical lie.