Clipper Chip Retreat

[Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>]

> I'll leave it to someone else to post the entire article, but the gist
> is that Gore sent a letter to Maria Cantwell saying that the
> administration is willing to consider alternatives to Clipper that are
> based upon nonclassified algrithms, and where the escrow agents are
> not government agencies.  They still insist on an escrow system,
> however.
 
This was an incredibly wise move on their part. We who still find 
the kindler gentler Clipper unacceptable are going to have a much harder
time convincing the public at large of our case. Before Clipper was such
a completley idiotic idea that almost anyone who wasn't on the NSA-s payrole
would automatically oppose it. It's still a bad idea, but a public-domain
algorithm clipper with non-governmental escrow agents isn't quite as 
obvously insane and inane as the previous clipper. 
 
On the other hand, we already have "clipper is bad", implanted in a lot of
people's minds. I don't think the administration is going to be able
to shake that loose quite so easily. And I do think we can convince many
people that new improved clipper is bad because of the escrow agency alone.
But it's not so easy. If the administation had come out with a version of this
kinder gentler clipper from the start, it might actually have been succesful.