Fighting Clipper III

[Timothy C. May]

At 6:37 AM -0700 10/3/96, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>You'll have trouble doing a successful boycott of RSA. What, you won't
>use Netscape Navigator or PGP?

We should be happy that both Netscape and Microsoft are conspicuously
missing from the list of GAK conspirators. We need to somehow keep it this
way.

On the list of GAK conspirators itself, this just confirms the "behind the
doors key escrow deal" I wrote about more than two years ago (check the
archives, for August 1994, under the thread name "Software Key Escrow" or
something close to this). A person within Microsoft confirmed to me that a
deal was being cut to put key escrow into _software_, rather than the
Clipper chip-based hardware option which was then dominant in the
discussions. (The plan followed revelations of a TIS-NSA-Berkeley axis that
developed in early '94 and that was made semi-public at the Karlsruhe,
Germany conference in the spring of '94.)

That Bill Gates has since come out strongly against software key escrow,
and that Microsoft has not joined this deal, is terribly important.
Netscape has also spoken against mandatory key escrow systems, in the
person of James Barksdale. (I'm not sure what Jim Clarke's position is
these days, after his much-discussed pro-GAK comments of about a year ago;
in any case, he's no longer actively supporting GAK from what I can see.)

Question: If RSADSI supports GAK, and Netscape/Microsoft license some
technologies from RSADSI, could Netscape or Microsoft then be forced to
adopt GAK?

(Personally, I don't see how. The core crypto routines might be licensed,
but these deals were probably negotiated a while back. But who knows?)

I think we should support Microsoft and Netscape in their nonparticipation
in the Cabal. Sometimes being an 800-pound gorilla has its advantages.

--Tim May

We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay at got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."