[850] in Cypherpunks
Lobbying for Cryptoprivacy, non-U.S.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Hart)
Fri Jun 4 12:59:38 1993
From: jhart@agora.rain.com (Jim Hart)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 93 9:43:27 PDT
>I have shied away from any "political" action against Clipper because I am
>unsure how a Canadian can help...
Non-U.S. citizens can lobby hard to get all phones containing
key-escrow (aka wiretap) chips banned in your country. You have a
very good argument: do y'all want Yankee spooks listening in on your
phone calls? Make sure the following specifics are included in the
legislation:
* Try to get key escrow banned *in general*, instead of just from foreign
countries. In smaller countries this will be easier since its doubtful
small governments can set up a spook/chip-maker axis to rival the
NSA/Mykotronx/VLSI axis in the U.S. In fact probably only the U.S.,
cooperating major European countries and Japan have such a capability.
* Be careful with the wording of the legislation; be sure to
specify *key-escrow* and not any other forms of cryptography.
* If political feasible the legislation should specifically encourage
private, commercial forms of cryptography.
Jim Hart
jhart@agora.rain.com
