The New GAK-Clipper Thing will Fail

[Bill Stewart]

At 03:07 PM 10/3/96 -0800, jim bell <jimbell at pacifier.com> wrote:
>The point, of course, is NOT to encourage these companies to support Clipper 
>IV.  Rather, goal is to suggest to them a "poison pill" which would make 
>their cooperation meaningless in the end, while at the same time giving them 
>a 2-year free 56-bit export.  Think of it as a monkey-wrench they can throw 
>into the works.

A really _fine_ post!  I'm also impressed by the way they announced it
just _after_ Congress ended its session, while they're busy losing the export
level in court.

On the other hand, boycotts aren't particularly useful, when 
RSA (who is or is not joining the Bad Guys) owns half the public key patents and
Cylink (who definitely is) owns the other half.  If you're selling public key,
you've got to pay the Bad Guys, until the DH patents expire in 97 (later for
RSA.)
Or you've got to buy from somebody who's paying the Bad Guys.

And the Bad Guys Unindicted Co-Conspirators' announcements haven't even
_mentioned_ permitting export of public key technology (since 56-bit RSA
doesn't quite make it.)  But they _could_ export Kerberos, with only
minor hacks needed to implement Key Ripoff.


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts at ix.netcom.com
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