Re: A Nice Summary of Motives for Clipper

[Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>]

Several people on sci.crypt have pointed to the following paragraph
in Matt Blaze's report of the NSA briefing on Clipper, posted here and
in the newsgroups:

> Clipper chips should be available (to product vendors) in June.  You
> can't just buy loose chips - they have to be installed in approved
> products.  Your application interface has to be approved by NIST for
> you to get your hands on the chips.

This could explain a lot.  In particular, if they can enforce this, it
could put an end to the dreams of multiple encryption.  For months people
have been saying, "Clipper?  No problem.  I'll just encrypt with PGP then
pass it through Clipper and the Feds won't ever guess!  Ha, ha, ha!"

Maybe this won't be so easy.  From Blaze's description it sounds like
such devices wouldn't be approved.  It could be the only Clipper phones
will be ones that don't do anything to keep the Feds from picking up the
conversation.

People could still build non-Clipper encrypting phones (assuming that
the constant rumors of threatening midnight visits from NSA agents are
false), but the users of those phones could no longer blend in with the
Clipper traffic.

Hal