Stewart Baker's web site & OECD international crypto policy

[John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>]

Stewart used to be General Counsel for NSA.  He retired to move into
private law practice with Steptoe & Johnson.  He has a variety of
short papers on encryption, network law & policy available on his
law firm's web site, http://www.us.net/~steptoe/.

My favorite was his summary report on the OECD meeting in December,
~steptoe/286908.htm, at which the US tried to parade some of the
fruits of its behind-the-scenes efforts to convince other governments
to become as authoritarian as the US government on crypto policy.

If the US government can quietly convince other countries to support
Clipper-like systems (including "mandatory key escrow" and "trusted
third parties") then they can say, "See, this is a real problem -- all
these other countries are having to deal with it too."  Of course, if
their covert US efforts to stir these people up become widely known, the
technique will have less impact.

The US government's efforts have failed to convince citizens and
industry that there's a problem, when they won't tell us what the
problem is but assure us that it's a really big problem.  Our own
government is now colluding with other governments -- against us and
their own citizens -- in a joint attempt to attempt to rob the
ordinary people of the world of our rights to privacy, free speech,
and free assembly.

It would be interesting to see notes from other participants in the
same OECD meeting(s).  Another 1-hour meeting was scheduled in
Canberra on Feb 9.  Anyone know what happened there?

	John Gilmore
--
Love your country but never trust its government.
		     -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania