Re: With friends like these...

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 06:31 PM 6/9/97 -0400, Adam Shostack wrote:
>Yes, these are our freinds.  They are attacking key recovery where its
>being sold; namely to companies.  And the report is damned effective
>at selling companies that 'the best cryptographers in the world'
>oppose this.  Its been very useful to me for that already.

Yeah.  They don't need to attack on the libertarian issues -
not only have they done that already (:-), but that's a political belief,
and their report is addressing the business issues that the government
is trying to use as a crowbar to get government access wedged into
the public's key management and crypto systems.
If Clipper 3 and Clipper 4 are bad technically, and bad economically,
businesses won't widely adopt it and push it on the public,
and they won't buy it enough for mass-market economies of scale
to kick in the way they do with MSDOS or SSNs-as-credit-identifiers.

Addressing the obvious blatant civil liberties bogosity of
the Clipper N programs is a job for a different audience,
and for speakers with a different sets of hats on - 
you wear the technical hat to say "Clipper N is broken technically",
as Matt Blaze et al. did for Clipper 1, and you wear the
respected-technical-consultants-to-business hat to say
"You can't trust this system with your money or trade secrets",
and you wear your civil liberties hat to say "Stop Big Brother!".
Our friends here are addressing the business audience,
so they're wearing the business-related hats.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
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