From: Carl Ellison <cme@sw.stratus.com>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 94 22:20:41 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: My letter to Gore
Message-ID: <199402120611.BAA04673@ellisun.sw.stratus.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Date: Sat, 12 Feb 1994 01:08:37 -0500
From: Carl Ellison <cme>
Message-Id: <199402120608.BAA04637@ellisun.sw.stratus.com>
To: vice_president@whitehouse.gov
Subject: Re: Clipper Chip
Newsgroups: alt.security

In article <helen.760998516@access1> you write:
>    But Gore indicated Thursday that the administration's
>position is "not locked in stone."
>    "Our determination to solve the problem is locked in stone,
>and our determination to proceed with this in the absence of a
>better solution is locked in stone," he said "...the burden is
>on those who say there is a better solution because no solution
>for the national security dimension of the problem
>is unacceptable to us."


Dear Mr. Vice President,

I enjoy a good challenge and I am educated in cryptography.  I am also an
opponent of Clipper.  If you would describe the national security dimension
of this problem to us, I would endeavour to find a solution to that piece
of the problem.  However, the only expression of the problem which I have
seen is a claim/fear that criminals can get access to strong cryptography
(true and always has been true [cf., David Kahn's "The Codebreakers"]) and
the claim that Clipper will somehow prevent that situation (false and never
substantiated).

The main supporter of Clipper in the technical community, Prof. Dorothy
Denning, recently said in a public posting that the real reasons for
Clipper are classified and therefore we the people have no ability to see
the facts and must therefore leave decision making up to you and the
President.  I beg to differ.  We must discuss this issue in public.  We can
not have a secret committee making such decisions.  We are talking about a
basic privacy right which the American people have held since the founding
of this country -- the right to invent, disseminate and use cryptography as
strong as the human mind can invent without any sharing of secret keys with
the government.

So, please Mr. Vice President, bring this issue into the public for debate
and follow through on that debate.  Last Spring, in response to NIST, I
submitted a list of questions, most of which have never been answered.  If
those questions had been answered, perhaps we would have had a resolution
by now of the "national security problem" to which you referred.

Sincerely,

Carl M. Ellison
2130 Mass Ave.  #5B
Cambridge MA  02140-1918
e-mail: cme@sw.stratus.com

-- 
 - <<Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are my own, of course.>>
 - Carl Ellison                                        cme@sw.stratus.com
 - Stratus Computer Inc.       M3-2-BKW                TEL: (508)460-2783
 - 55 Fairbanks Boulevard ; Marlborough MA 01752-1298  FAX: (508)624-7488