[14772] in Cypherpunks
Re: The Illogic of Clipper
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Norman Hardy)
Sun Jun 5 20:19:03 1994
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 1994 17:01:53 -0800
To: "Ed Carp [SysAdmin]" <khijol!erc@uunet.UU.NET>, cypherpunks@toad.com
From: norm@netcom.com (Norman Hardy)
At 15:27 6/5/94 +0100, Ed Carp [SysAdmin] wrote:
>I'm sorry, but I just don't understand the government's position on
>Clipper. After all, the best way for people to ensure that the
>government's not going to listen in on their communications is to not use
>Clipper. Now, unless it was a crime to use anything other than Clipper,
>the government couldn't do a thing about it.
I think that NSA, FBI & CIA hope that Clipper will become a de facto
standard resulting from its being required for certain kinds of
interactions with government agencies. If this were to happen non-clipper
products would have a more difficult time attaining a critical mass. The
real purpose of Clipper can thus be stated as an attempt to prevent the
success of some de facto standard that the government could not tap. I
recall hearing someone from NSA say something very much like this.
...
