From: Rolf Michelsen <Rolf.Michelsen@delab.sintef.no>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 94 00:01:05 PST
To: Cypherpunks mailing list <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: Re: Disinformation (or the Truth?) About Clipper
In-Reply-To: <199402222138.NAA14229@mail.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.3.88.9402230852.B18236-0100000@pluto.er.sintef.no>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Tue, 22 Feb 1994, Timothy C. May wrote:

[Much stuff deleted...]

> - foreigners...I get a real rise our of my overseas friends when I
> tell them what the National Security Agency has planned for them.
> 
> (By the way, I've seen little discussion here of the fact that the
> Germans, French, and NATO nations in general seem to be signing on for
> some version of the Clipper system. I can provided details if there's
> interest. In all the debate a few weeks ago about whether Germany is
> more or less free than America, it was left out that Germany is about
> to roll back certain Constitutional freedoms and explicity allow more
> surveillance. We should not be pushing our German or European list
> members (a la Hadmut Danisch) into defending their countries--rather,
> they need to fight the fight as well. In fact, more Cypherpunks need
> to be recruited in Europe, which shows many signs of slipping back
> into a Surveillance State, with barely a whimper of public outcry.)

Yes, there is an interest.  Please provide whatever information you have 
on "European Clipperism".  I haven't seen any discussion or reports on 
any such initiatives in Norwegian media.  I suppose that there isn't a 
"critical mass" of interested people in small countries like Norway for 
these issues.  There has been one attempt by one Norwegian party 
(Venstre) to raise questions on personal privacy issues, but without any 
success.  (This party has been out of parlament for a while and has some 
trouble getting heard.)

Work has been done by official Norwegian agencies to develop a National 
Encryption Standard (NSK).  The result of this work is a classified 
algorithm and a chip which implements it, much like the Clipper 
initiative.  There was also a suggestion about something like a key escrow 
system, but this seems to have been dropped.  NSK has had some press 
coverage, most notably in a left-wing paper (Klassekampen) and Computerworld 
Norway.

In a speech held by one of the organizers of the NSK project some two 
years ago, it was indicated that NSK was developed partly to assure 
Norwegian control of the algorithm and independence of foreign algorithms.

Could other Europeans provide information on similar activities in other 
countries??

By the way, I agree with those who oppose disinformation on Clipper and 
related issues.  Such strategies will likely hit you like a boomerang.  
The clarification by TCM on what he meant by "disinformation" was 
welcome.  I, and it seems others who opposed the disinformation strategy, 
understand this world differently than TCM.


-- Rolf




----------------------------------------------------------------------
Rolf Michelsen         Phone:  +47 73 59 87 33
SINTEF DELAB           Email:  rolf.michelsen@delab.sintef.no
7034 Trondheim         Office: C339
Norway
----------------------------------------------------------------------